The Un-American Anti-Koch Campaign

But, it's the Koch Brothers who are Un-American and unpatriotic.

By Rich Lowry 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has high standards for American-ness. That’s why it carried such weight when Reid described the Koch brothers in a speech on the Senate floor as “about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine.” Coming from a typical Democratic politician lacking Reid’s powers of patriotic discernment, this would have been shameful hyperbole. From Reid, it was a peerless act of taxonomy. 

What immediately had him so exercised was anti-Obamacare ads funded by the Koch brothers, but surely other potentially un-American activities lurked in the back of his mind. David Koch gave $100 million to a theater in New York City so people can perform ballet and opera there. Has David Koch never thought to invest in cowboy poetry? No wonder Reid harbors the darkest suspicions about his true loyalties. 

Actually, of course, Harry Reid long ago established his comfort making any half-witted partisan attack. In his cracked version of forensic accounting, he said in 2012 that Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes in 10 years — because he had heard it from some guy. 

If you want to score a contest between the Koch brothers and Harry Reid over who has contributed more to America, it doesn’t seem close. The Koch brothers got wealthy creating productive industries that employ tens of thousands of people. Harry Reid got (obviously much less) wealthy as a career politician. 

Any one of the Koch brothers’ many major philanthropic ventures — say, the $100 million to New York Presbyterian Hospital, or just the $35 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History — will do more good than Harry Reid’s constant maneuvers to try to protect his vulnerable incumbents. 

Reid’s maligning of the Koch brothers is part of a deliberate, party-wide effort to attack the politically engaged libertarian duo. Groups that the Kochs have donated to or are affiliated with have spent some $30 million on the midterm elections so far, with more on the way. For Democrats, that is a mortal sin. 

There is no consistent standard here. In 2004, Reid didn’t complain about a globe-trotting billionaire who made a mint through currency speculation spending more than $25 million trying to defeat President George W. Bush. By Reid’s standard, George Soros was as robustly American as John Wayne in the “Sands of Iwo Jima.” 

You can litigate the accuracy of the ads by Koch-supported groups, but as a genre, attack ads play fast and loose (although there’s no reason for anti-Obamacare ads to be anything but strictly accurate, since there’s so much material to work with). You can disagree with their politics, but they broadly represent about half of America. You can lament their spending, but welcome to our world. 

It used to be that political parties mattered much more. In their wisdom, campaign-finance reformers passed restrictions hamstringing them. This predictably elevated the importance of outside players. The Koch brothers are hugely influential, but the left doesn’t lack for people trying, in Reid’s stilted terms, “to buy America.” Green billionaire Tom Steyer has pledged to spend $100 million supporting Democrats this year.

The billionaire Koch brothers can agitate against cap and trade, and billionaire Steyer can agitate for it. That’s how a free political system works. In his speech during the Democratic global warming talkathon Monday, Reid attacked the other side’s billionaires (a.k.a. oil barons) during an event that was coordinated with his own side’s billionaire (Democratic senators had discussed the idea of the mock filibuster with Steyer at a fundraiser, of all places). 

The break-glass-in-emergency Democratic option in tough midterm elections is finding a boogeyman. In 2010, it was “secret foreign money” funneled through the Chamber of Commerce. This absurdly tendentious demagoguery didn’t stop Republicans from picking up more than 60 House seats. 

Nor will the attack on the Kochs affect this year’s outcome one way or another. Are we supposed to believe that the public, which is overwhelmingly sour on Obamacare, will ignore their own feelings about the highly consequential law and treat the midterms as a referendum on the people funding ads attacking the law they don’t like in the first place? 

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has launched an anti-Koch campaign with the slogan, “The G.O.P. is addicted to Koch.” Most people will wonder, “Why are Republicans addicted to COACH? Or, KOTCH, the entertaining late mayor of New York?” For the line to work, Democrats would have to explain, “No, no. It’s COKE. Like the soda, and the drug. Get it?” 

The left can be forgiven for thinking everyone else is as obsessed with the Koch brothers as they are. The log on the Koch Industries website of the more than 200 New York Times stories mentioning the Kochs since 2011 runs about 20 pages when printed. The iconic motto of the paper could be updated to “All the News Fit to Print about the Shadowy Brothers Trashing America.” The logical endpoint of this anti-Kochery was the spectacle the other day of left-wingers protesting the coming advent of the David H. Koch Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital because of its association with a philanthropist with uncongenial politics. How long before demonstrators target the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center during a New York City Ballet performance of “Swan Lake,” and interrupt the dance of the little swans with cries of “Koch Kills Democracy”? 

It is inevitable that any conservative writing about this kind of campaign will quote the Saul Alinsky dictum from his book “Rules for Radicals”: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” In its piece on Reid’s anti-Koch gambit, The New York Times reports, “The majority leader was particularly struck by a presentation during a recent Senate Democratic retreat, which emphasized that one of the best ways to draw an effective contrast is to pick a villain, one of his aides said.” 

How high-minded. For a powerful national officeholder to stoop to such personal invective against private citizens seems bullying and itself vaguely un-American. But I defer to Harry Reid. He is the expert on American-ness.

SoRo: 

Two words, Dingy Harry: George Soros

He has caused the collapse of governments and is known as ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank of England.’

Your hypocrisy is showing.

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