David Brock's message for liberal millionaires: Don’t sweat being called hypocrites. Existential crisis of leftist millionaires

David Brock has a message for liberal millionaires: Don’t sweat being called hypocrites.

Brock, a former “right-wing hit-man”- turned -top-big-money-Democratic- operative, is part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to convince donors it’s OK to attack the Koch brothers for spending millions of dollars while doing the exact same thing for the left.


“You’re not in this room today trying to figure out how to rig the game so you can be free to make money poisoning little kids, and neither am I,” Brock told donors this month at a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to someone who attended the conference, but who declined to be identified because it was closed to the press.

“Subscribing to a false moral equivalence is giving the Kochs exactly what they want: keeping us quiet about what they’re doing to destroy the very fabric of our nation,” added Brock, whose deep-pocketed nonprofit groups are leading the charge to make the conservative megadonors Charles and David Koch an issue in the 2014 midterms.

( Also on POLITICO: Inside the vast liberal conspiracy)

Conservatives reject the notion that rich liberals donate more out of their concern for society than do their conservative counterparts like the Kochs. But Brock’s pitch also isn’t sitting well with some major liberal donors and operatives, who worry the anti-Koch strategy could backfire big time. It has not yet been proven effective at motivating key Democratic voting blocs like unmarried women and minorities, and liberal critics also worry it risks undercutting more important issues, smacks of class warfare and opens themselves up to hypocrisy charges.

“The Democrats’ problem is off-year turnout, and I’m not clear how emphasizing the Koch brothers gets more black and brown folks to the polls,” said Steve Phillips, a member of the secretive Democracy Alliance club of major liberal donors. “My sense for voters of color is that the issues of income inequality, housing, education, immigration reform, health care and criminal justice reform would resonate more.

So while big-money liberals scramble to match the unprecedented money plans being methodically prosecuted by Koch brothers’ political operation, they’re also grappling with more fundamental strategic questions — are we really that different from the Kochs and do voters really care?

( OPEN MIKE: Media Matters, American Bridge founder David Brock)

If it’s not resolved efficiently, the debate could undermine a central piece of their strategy for 2014 and beyond, and send liberal donors to the sidelines indefinitely.

The partisan focus on the Kochs is also off-putting for another group of major liberal donors — those whose giving is, perhaps ironically, motivated by a desire to reduce the flow of money into politics.

“I think it would be much better to talk about the Koch brothers and Soros,” said Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream , referring to the billionaire financier George Soros, who helped start the Democracy Alliance. Cohen has spent heavily pushing a long-shot constitutional amendment to blunt the impacts of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that sparked a wave of big-money political spending. “I am dismayed at the way that Democrats are using it as a partisan issue.”

In the elite world of big Democratic money, Brock is seen as the perfect evangelist to help convince rich liberals of their moral superiority — and to help them grow some backbone. After channeling support from conservative megadonors into attacks on the Clintons, Brock renounced the right in the late 1990s and has since built an empire of well-funded liberal attack groups leading the charge against the Kochs.

( Also on POLITICO: Clinton: We pay our taxes)

At the New Mexico speech, which was hosted by a Democracy Alliance offshoot called the Committee on the States and attended by major donors including Jonathan Soros, Brock acknowledged what he called, “liberal hypersensitivity to charges of hypocrisy. After all, Democratic campaigns and organizations increasingly rely on big money, too. Why, it might even be said that it’s a bit hypocritical of me to come to a closed-door conference of big donors and the organizations that rely on them and stand up here bashing the Koch brothers. So be it.”

Brock did not dispute the characterization of the speech, but he declined to comment on it, since it was closed to the press. A source close to him, though, stressed that Brock’s goal is to focus is on the Kochs’ agenda, rather than on them personally.

He already has some influential allies in the Democracy Alliance, despite concerns in the DA ranks about Koch attacks stoking class warfare.

( For more on big money in politics, check out Ken Vogel’s new book)

“Criticizing Koch-led campaign spending is not vilifying the rich,” said David desJardins, an early Google employee and DA board member. “If someone wants to vilify David and Charles Koch for being rich, I think that would be dumb. Criticizing them for attempting to buy elections and for squashing any attempts to limit the influence of money in politics is very different.”

In April 2011, multiple donors expressed uneasiness after a screening at a Democracy Alliance conference of part of a documentary by the liberal nonprofit production studio Brave New Films called “ Koch Brothers Exposed,” and at least one even walked out, according to sources. The documentary — which splice s together photos of various Koch brothers’ homes with stats on how much they make per hour and allegations that they’re trying to “run roughshod over the American people” — struggled to raise money from major donors, and the Democracy Alliance subsequently removed Brave New Films from its top tier of grantees.

Brave New Films’ president, Robert Greenwald, asserted the demotion by the DA was unrelated to the Koch documentary , which has gotten a second life as Democratic leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have embraced the Koch attacks. And Greenwald disputed characterizations that it was poorly received by DA types back in 2011.

( Also on POLITICO: Bill Clinton: Hillary 'not out of touch')

“I don’t know what I’m allowed to talk about with Democracy Alliance or not talk about with Democracy Alliance, because I’m not in Democracy Alliance anymore,” Greenwald told POLITICO. “I thought there was a good response. But people don’t tell you everything. … It was a small screening. It was late at night. And even if they wanted to walk out, I don’t think they would have done it with me sitting right there.”

Follow @politico

The Democracy Alliance in a shift in course last year, expanded the list of groups it encourages its donors to support, including 172 groups in the broader liberal community, including Brave New Films and a host of others that are devoting significant resources to spotlighting the Kochs. They include:

• American Bridge — A super PAC and nonprofit founded by Brock, it has become a hub of anti-Koch activity. It launched a project dedicated to assailing the Kochs called RealKochFacts — a name that teases the actual Kochfacts website set up by the brothers’ industrial conglomerate to defend itself. The Bridge project launched with a cable television ad buy, but it also includes three full-time staffers researching the Koch donor network and pushing their findings, some of which formed the basis of a front-page article in the Sunday edition of The New York Times last month.

• The American Independent Institute — An investigative journalism outlet Brock is relaunching to expose “the nexus of conservative power in Washington.” Among the first projects of The American Independent Institute, will be a documentary about “the adverse impacts of the right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers’ business practices.”

• Mother Jones, Alternet, The Nation, Washington Monthly and Democracy Now — The nonprofit liberal journalism outfits have all devoted significant time and space to scrutinizing the Kochs and their political activities.

• Senate Majority PAC and House Majority PAC — The super PACs supporting Democratic congressional candidates have worked with American Bridge to develop Koch-related ads hitting GOP candidates. In a House Majority PAC ad attacking the GOP rival to vulnerable Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, a narrator gravely asks viewers “Care about your retirement? Then you should know who’s behind Evan Jenkins. The New York billionaire Koch brothers have spent $1.2 million to elect Evan Jenkins, while spending millions more to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program.”

• America Votes — The voter mobilization nonprofit early this year did some polling intended partly to determine how the Kochs could be used as an election-year issue to Democrats’ advantage.

• Center for American Progress and its blog ThinkProgress — Both have been spotlighting the Kochs for years in white papers and blog posts alleging that they’re using secretive political spending to try to pad their pockets.

Conservatives bristle at the argument that liberal donors have higher purity of purpose than the Kochs, especially when it’s pushed by groups backed by big — and mostly secretive — money that comes through the Democracy Alliance or other similar avenues as the Koch networks’ spending.

“This was always the most galling thing about the attacks on the Kochs,” said Michael Goldfarb, a former Koch consultant who helps lead the nonprofit Washington Free Beacon, which has spotlighted big liberal donors, their spending and the overlap between it and their economic interests. He described a “fairy tale that liberal donors are selfless and conservative donors self-interested, but it’s bullshit and liberal donors should be very nervous about what they’ve started — chickens will come home to roost.”

Beyond any potential turnabout, there’s a broader question about whether donor-targeting can be an effective strategy. Polls show that half of Americans don’t recognize the Koch brothers’ names, and only 21 percent viewed them negatively. Donor targeting didn’t seem to work when Republicans singled out George Soros in 2004 during his then-unprecedented $27 million spending spree to try to defeat President George W. Bush.

( DRIVING THE DAY: Primary preview)

But Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said “the use of the Koch brothers against the Koch brothers” can “literally invert” races.

“So they will also be a brand, and it also reinforces that message that (Republicans) are all about their special interest and their self-interest, and they don’t care about the middle class,” Israel said in a recent wide-ranging interview with POLITICO reporters. “My assumption is that you’ll see it in other races going forward because it’s working so well.”

It’s understandable that liberal donors and operatives would pay attention to the Kochs, said Democracy Alliance President Gara LaMarche, but that doesn’t mean there’s a vast anti-Koch left-wing billionaire conspiracy.

“A number of groups we support have focused on the Kochs, but there is no DA-coordinated strategy to do so,” LaMarche said. “With a group of progressive donors, it’s natural that there would be some interest in conservative donors. You want to have a positive vision, but you can’t ignore what the other side is doing, so it’s something we talk about from time to time.”

In April, the Democracy Alliance staff drafted talking points addressing the Koch equivalency in preparation for its secretive annual spring meeting at Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton.

“How is the DA any different from the Koch brothers?” read one section of a draft question-and-answer memo from its spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller to its board members. “There’s really no comparison,” read the response. It argued that the Democracy Alliance donors and their grantees have more say in how their money gets spent than in the Koch operation and boasted that “the Democracy Alliance doesn’t represent a single industry or family,” which seemed based on a faulty assumption that the Koch donor network was primarily comprised of the Koch family.

Neil Sroka, spokesman for Democracy for America, which is listed as a DA beneficiary and has swiped the Kochs, suggested the Kochs have become a target of opportunity for the big-money left.

“It’s not people sitting in a backroom saying you talk about this and I’ll talk about that,” Sroka said. The Kochs “aren’t a dog whistle, they’re a straight up whistle. The Koch brothers have made themselves the clearest villains.”

Follow @politico