Koch-Funded Ads Bearing Fruit

In a lengthy piece at National Review Online, Eliana Johnson delves into the years-long "sustained assault against Obamacare mounted with the help of the donor network organized by Charles and David Koch and the array of social welfare groups it funds."

Johnson reports that the Koch-funded ads "represent five years of knowledge, accumulated through polls and focus groups, about how to use the health care issue" effectively to shift public opinion.

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, unlimited outside spending by 501(c)(4) social-welfare groups has finally allowed Republicans to match the political muscle of labor unions, whose spending was also blown open by the decision, but which have long poured money into Democratic coffers.

That newfound equity is one reason why the AFP ads have sent Democrats into a tailspin and led them to make the ads, and two of the people funding them, a major campaign issue of 2014. Senate majority leader Harry Reid devoted much of a news conference and an entire speech on the Senate floor to attacking the Koch brothers, calling their efforts “un-American” and accusing them of trying to rig the political system in their favor. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched a digital campaign around the rallying cry “The GOP is addicted to Koch!”

The effort came about when conservative and libertarian donors surveyed the landscape and realized that the only groups standing in opposition to nationalized health care were 501(c)(3)s, which were prohibited from participating in campaign-related activity. "There weren't any groups operating in the [501](c)(4) space devoted to putting the brakes on a national health care bill."

The Koch network’s anti-Obamacare assault began in 2009 with Sean Noble, a former chief of staff to Arizona congressman John Shadegg and then an adviser to the Koch brothers, and Randy Kendrick, the wife of Arizona Diamondbacks part-owner Ken Kendrick and a prominent donor to the Kochs’ formidable fundraising network....

The result of Kendrick and Noble’s efforts was the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR), which was incorporated in April 2009 and funded largely through donations from the Koch network. The two attended a June 2009 Koch donor seminar in Aspen, Colo., where, Noble says, a federal takeover of health care was for the first time introduced to donors as an issue of urgent importance.

Before lunch on the third and final day of the seminar, Noble says, Kendrick delivered an “impassioned speech” on the topic. “People were moved to tears by how invested she was in this,” Noble says, and at the lunch that followed her remarks, donors spontaneously pledged $13 million to the cause. Since then, similar lunches have raised over $100 million.

Read the rest of Johnson's remarkable story,  Inside the Koch-Funded Ads Giving Dems Fits, of the dedication and well-orchestrated activity of the Koch brothers, other anonymous donors, and multiple (c)(4) groups behind the 63-seat U.S. House member shift in 2010, and what they are doing this year to shift the balance of power in the U.S. Senate in 2014.

Concludes Johnson, "If Harry Reid thinks he’s fed up with the Kochs now, he may just be getting the first taste of what their political network has in store."