Giving the Kochs a run for their money

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Democrats enlist billionaires to give right a run for their money
By Richard McGregor, February 21, 2014

It was Al Gore who summed up the sentiment of the attendees at the A-List Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco on Wednesday when he was asked to toast the host, billionaire-turned-green activist, Tom Steyer.

Riffing off the nickname of a famous baseball player, Mr Gore called the former hedge fund manager “Mr Tipping Point”, as the person whose commitment and wealth could turn climate change into an election winner for the Democrats.

“He’s not just saying it; he’s going to succeed in doing it,” Mr Gore said, according to one guest at the party.

The money men of the rightwing, such as the industrialist brothers, Charles and David Koch, have gained much attention for the tens of millions of dollars they have poured into politics since caps on campaign finance were lifted by a series of court decisions in recent years.

Mr Steyer plans to give the Kochs and their allies a run for their money from the environmental left, pledging to assemble a $100m-plus war chest for the congressional midterm elections in November, half from his own pocket and the rest from donors.

“I would not look at that number as a ceiling – we have made clear that 2014 is going to be an expansion,” said Chris Lehane, a political consultant advising Mr Steyer.

Mr Steyer, with a net worth estimated by Forbes to be $1.5bn, has already spent upwards of $50m in the past two to three years on politics, including $11m in the Virginia governor’s race in late 2013.

Virginia was a “beta test”, Mr Steyer’s advisers say, for deploying new techniques to get young people out to vote on climate change, the sort of thing Democrats must do to fend off the Republican challenge to their Senate majority.

“Climate is their number one issue – if you want to get young people to turn out, you have to talk about it,” said Mr Lehane.

But climate change and the issue that Mr Steyer has worked hard to make a litmus test of the issue – the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry heavy oil from Canada to the gulf coast – cut across party lines.

Five years after it was first proposed, TransCanada’s plans for the $7bn pipeline remain caught up in federal inquiries and state legal challenges that will probably delay a final decision beyond this year.

Standing next to Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, at a trilateral summit in Mexico this week, President Barack Obama made it clear he would not be rushing the process.

“Keystone will proceed along the path that’s already been set forth,” he said.

For all the Democratic activists like Mr Steyer who oppose the pipeline, however, some of the party’s most vulnerable senators, like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, embrace Keystone as a vote winner in their state.

Just as the Tea Party’s attacks on Republicans they regard as insufficiently conservative have upended the right, many Democrats fret that Mr Steyer’s aggression could have the same disruptive impact on the left.

Mr Lehane tried to put those fears to rest this week, saying Mr Steyer’s campaign group, NextGen Climate Action, would not spend money directly against Mrs Landrieu.

“We’re certainly not subscribing to what I would call the Tea Party theory of politics,” Mr Lehane said.

Mrs Landrieu, already under attack from a Koch-backed campaign group over her support for Mr Obama’s health reforms, is making a virtue of the threats against her.

“I have billionaires on both sides, and I’m exactly where I should be, which is right in the middle,” Mrs Landrieu told the National Journal.

Mr Steyer’s campaign highlights the tensions in the evolving Democratic base built under Mr Obama, which relies less on blue-collar workers and more on a patchwork coalition of the young, women, social liberals, environmentalists and minorities.

The function at Mr Steyer’s palatial home in San Francisco attended by Al Gore was a fundraiser for the Democratic Senate campaign. Many Democratic senators, including majority leader, Harry Reid, attended. Mrs Landrieu did not.

Democrats have been aghast about big-spending by wealthy conservatives like the Koch brothers, since campaign finance became a free-for-all after courts lifted caps on donations to outside campaign groups in 2010.

Mr Steyer’s money, they insist, is different, borne not out of “economic self-interest” but the urgency of combating global warming.

“There is an enormous amount of outside money coming in from the fossil fuel industry and others that is trying to trump the majority will of the country,” said Mr Lehane.

“What Tom is spending is, by any objective analysis, a very small drop in a very large oil bucket of money.”
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