The Koch Brothers’ Big Bucks
In case anyone needed a reminder about the kind of forces Democrats will be up against next year, the Koch brothers are putting together their plan to help buy the 2012 elections.
The billionaire industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch plan to steer more than $200 million — potentially much more — to conservative groups ahead of Election Day, POLITICO has learned. That puts their libertarian-leaning network in the same league as the most active of the groups in the more establishment-oriented network conceived last year by veteran GOP operatives Rove and Ed Gillespie, which plans to raise $240 million.
That’s financing for an awful lot of attack ads, nearly all of which will be dishonest, and which a whole lot of voters will believe.
It’ll be interesting, though, to see whether Democrats are able to make the Koch money toxic. We learned last week that there’s ample evidence that Koch Industries made “improper payments” (read: bribes) to “secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002.” One of those countries, it turns out, is Iran, which has purchased millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment from the Kochs’ company, despite a trade ban and the U.S. labeling Iran a state sponsor of terrorism. The Kochs’ business also stand accused of having “rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.”
This is the money that’s going to buy elections for Republicans?
Over the summer, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) declared, “Plain and simple, if you do business with Iran, you cannot do business with America.”
Follow-up question for Cantor, who’s accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Koch Industries: those who do business with Iran cannot do business with America, but can they partner with the Republican Party to swing an election cycle?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, October 10, 2011
Karl Rove: Setting The Bar For “Success” Too Low
Karl Rove’s new Wall Street Journal column is all about House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) “surprising success” so far in 2011. As Rove sees it, Boehner has had a “remarkable run” by having “out-maneuvered” President Obama repeatedly.
Mr. Boehner may not be an inspiring orator, but he has moved the country and Congress in his direction. He has succeeded in large part because he had a more modest view of the post than his recent predecessors. […]
So Washington’s agenda this fall will reflect the priorities not of the glitzy Mr. Obama but of the modest, well-grounded Mr. Boehner.
Rove’s larger point seems to be that Boehner — or at least Boehner’s caucus — is largely dictating the agenda in Washington, and there’s obviously some truth to that. By refusing to compromise, adopting an unyielding right-wing agenda, and normalizing extortion politics, House Republicans have had considerable success, at least insofar as they’re dictating terms and fighting debates on their turf.
But Rove’s column comes across as kind of silly if one stops to think about the larger context.
For all of Rove’s gushing about the Speaker’s “surprising success,” Boehner’s tenure has been a seven-month-long fiasco. The Speaker has routinely struggled to keep his caucus in line behind his leadership, for example, and has found in many key instances that House Republicans simply don’t care what Boehner thinks. Whereas the Speaker traditionally is one of Washington’s most powerful players, Boehner is arguably the weakest Speaker we’ve seen in many decades — he’s not leading an unruly caucus; his unruly caucus is leading him.
Indeed, Rove seems especially impressed that Boehner has blocked White House attempts at additional revenue. What Rove neglects to mention is that Boehner was fully prepared to make an agreement with Obama for additional revenue, only to find that the Speaker’s caucus would forcefully reject the compromise.
What’s more, looking back at Boehner’s “successes,” it’s hard not to notice that Congress hasn’t passed any meaningful legislation at all this year — and in all likelihood, the Speaker will help oversee a Congress in which nothing of significance passes at all.
What have we seen from Boehner’s chamber since January? Five resignations, zero jobs bills, two near-shutdowns, no major legislative accomplishments, and the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt, attributed almost entirely to the antics of Boehner’s Republican caucus.
Also note, thanks to Boehner’s sterling work, Congress now has its lowest approval rating in three decades, and Boehner’s personal approval ratings are spiraling in the wrong direction.
If Rove finds this impressive, I’m afraid he’s set the bar for “success” much too low.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 25, 2011
The GOP Is Fed Up With Its Choices
In theory, Democrats should be nervous about Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s decision to enter the presidential race. In practice, though, it’s Republicans who have zoomed up the anxiety ladder into freak-out mode.
To clarify, not all Republicans are reaching for the Xanax, just those who believe the party has to appeal to centrist independents if it hopes to defeat President Obama next year. Also, those who believe that calling Social Security “an illegal Ponzi scheme” and suggesting that Medicare is unconstitutional might not be the best way to win the votes of senior citizens.
These and other wild-eyed views are set out in Perry’s book “Fed Up!” His campaign has already begun trying to distance the governor from his words, with communications director Ray Sullivan saying last week that the book “is a look back, not a path forward” — that “Fed Up!” was intended “as a review and critique of 50 years of federal excesses, not in any way as a 2012 campaign blueprint or manifesto.”
One problem with this attempted explanation is that the book was published way back in . . . the fall of 2010. It’s reasonable to assume that if Perry held a bunch of radical, loony views less than a year ago, he holds them today.
Another problem is that as recently as Aug. 14, according to the Wall Street Journal, Perry responded to an Iowa voter who asked how he would fix entitlement programs by saying, “Have you read my book, ‘Fed Up!’? Get a copy and read it.”
But Perry doesn’t give us time to plow through his tome, what with his frequent newsmaking forays onto the rhetorical fringe. He had barely been in the race for 48 hours when he announced it would be “treasonous” for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to increase the money supply before the 2012 election. If Bernanke did so, Perry said, “we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”
The outburst allowed Ron Paul, who has spent years calling for the Fed to be abolished, to say of Perry: “He makes me look like a moderate.”
Perry made no attempt to disavow his remarks about Bernanke. Whatever his campaign staff might wish, the candidate apparently does not warm to the task of disavowal.
Soon Perry moved on to the science of climate change, which “Fed Up!” dismisses as a “contrived phony mess.” Perry told an audience in New Hampshire that “a substantial number of scientists” have acted in bad faith, manipulating data “so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects.” Perry added that “we’re seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.”
None of that is true. There is overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that human activity — especially the burning of fossil fuels — is contributing to climate change. Multiple investigations have found no evidence of fraud or manipulation of data. Unless Perry is ready to publish fundamental new insights into physical and chemical processes at the molecular level, his swaggering stance against climate science is all hat and no cattle.
“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the anti-science party, we have a huge problem,” candidate Jon Huntsman said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” — a declaration that makes me wonder how familiar Huntsman is with the political organization he seeks to lead.
Also in his first week of campaigning, Perry suggested that the military doesn’t respect Obama as commander in chief — and, when asked whether he believes Obama loves America, told a reporter that “you need to ask him.” This is music to the ears of the hate-Obama crowd on the far right. But mainstream voters, whether or not they support Obama’s policies, generally like the president, do not question his patriotism and want him to succeed.
“I think when you find yourself at an extreme end of the Republican Party,” Huntsman said of Perry, “you make yourself unelectable.”
He’s correct. But maybe we shouldn’t take his word for it, or Ron Paul’s word — after all, they’re Perry’s opponents. Maybe we also shouldn’t take the word of Karl Rove, who called Perry’s remarks “unpresidential,” since Texas apparently isn’t big enough for the George W. Bush camp and the Rick Perry camp to coexist without feuding.
Suffice it to note that two weeks ago, GOP luminaries were scrambling to find new candidates. And now, after Perry’s debut? Still scrambling, I’m afraid.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 22, 2011
Is The Tea Party Killing The Republican Party?
Conservatives are between a rock and a hard place. The Tea Party is in and the GOP is out. Tea Party is a brand that is popular with conservative voters but doesn’t have a national financial base. The Republican Party has a national finance infrastructure but it has been obliterated ideologically by the Tea Party. The emergence of the Tea Party keeps Karl Rove and other D.C. Republicans awake at night. But I’m not losing any sleep because of Karl Rove’s nightmares.
It wouldn’t be the first time in American history that an upstart has killed a party. In the 1840s and 1850s the Whigs gave way to the Republican Party. The old party wouldn’t or couldn’t take a strong antislavery position while Republicans did. The Republicans blossomed as the party of a strong national government while Democrats remained in the GOP’s dust as the party of rebellion and states’ rights. Timing is everything in politics and Democrats continued to fight for state power, right after a war that established the dominance of national power over states’ rights.
Or the opposite may happen. Populism gained favor in the 1890s because of its strong stance against corporate and government corruption but Democrats saved themselves and absorbed the populists by dropping its corporate coziness and becoming a peoples’ party.
And even though the great populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan lost the presidential elections in 1896, 1900 and 1908, the Great Commoner transformed a states’ rights party into a national force that produced the platform for presidential victories by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and 1916 and by FDR in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and by Harry Truman in 1948.
In the 2010 primary elections, the Tea Party prevailed in just about every race against an establishment Republican congressional candidate. The GOP’s tendency to eat its own young prevented them from winning the Senate in 2010 and may stop win from winning the presidency and the U.S. Senate in 2012.
My guess is the Democratic leader of the Senate offers a daily prayer to the Tea Party. If the Republicans had not nominated Sharron Angle, a Tea Party favorite to oppose him, he would not be a U.S. senator. If the Tea Party hadn’t nominated extremists in Senate campaigns, he wouldn’t be the majority leader if he had been re-elected.
Last year, the GOP nominated Tea Party extremists and consequently lost Senate races in in three states where the party should have won. The candidates were Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Angle in Nevada and Ken Buck in Colorado. In this cycle, the Tea party is going after moderately conservative GOP senators, Dick Lugar of Indiana and Olympia Snowe in Maine. The Tea Party might very well win both primaries and hand over solid Republican seats to new Democratic senators and allow them to take the Senate back from Republicans.
But I’m not losing any sleep over that either.
By: Brad Brannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 2, 2011
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