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Published on: 12/12/2005
Last Visited: 8/9/2007
And according to Richard P. Nathan, director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York and a former aide to President Nixon, the states' government activism could lead to a surge of federal activism.That's been the case in earlier periods when conservatives governed Washington, Nathan reports in a paper that will be released this month."When conservative coalitions controlled national offices, programs that were incubated, tested and debugged in liberal states become the basis for later national action," he writes.The Progressive Era policies of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were inspired by state child labor laws and public health reforms in the late 19th century, for example, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was based on state efforts in the 1920s to establish minimum labor standards and aid for the poor, Nathan says.