In late February, President Obama proposed, not for the first time, that Congress end four billion dollars’ worth of subsidies for oil and gas companies. “They can either stand up for the oil companies, or they can stand up for the American people,” the President declared during one of his weekly radio addresses not long afterward. He seemed to be signalling that he will be running for President this year, as he did four years ago, in open opposition to the American oil industry: “These are the same oil companies that have been making record profits off the money you spend at the pump. . . . It’s outrageous. It’s inexcusable.”

Lee Raymond, the former C.E.O., once said, “We see governments come and go.” Illustration by Shout

The President’s policies toward the oil industry are not easy to categorize. He has backed oil and natural-gas alternatives such as solar power and wind power, and also the development of electric cars. Yet he has encouraged new domestic oil production as well. “We are drilling more,” he declared in Oklahoma last month, standing before a huge stack of copper pipeline segments. “Anyone who says that we’re somehow suppressing domestic oil production isn’t paying attention.”

The President’s actions—attacking oil-company profits while proposing more oil drilling—can be best understood as political responses to rising gasoline prices. The average price of a gallon has risen by more than fifteen per cent since January, and congressional Republicans have repeatedly attacked the President for not doing enough to keep prices down. Between 2010 and 2011, over-all spending on gasoline in the United States rose by twenty-five per cent; the percentage of household income that Americans spend on gas has tripled since the late nineteen-nineties. The President has acknowledged that there is no way that the expansion of drilling can affect gasoline prices anytime soon—it takes a long time to add to the supply, and, in any event, gas prices are tied to the global oil price, which is determined by factors such as turmoil in the Middle East and Chinese consumption rates. But, by calling for more drilling, Obama can say that he is taking action. By lambasting the oil companies, he can suggest that he is not at fault.

The contest between the Democrats and Big Oil this year will be reciprocal, and Big Oil will be led by ExxonMobil, by far the largest and most profitable oil corporation headquartered in the United States. In recent election cycles, the corporation has directed more of its political-action-committee spending to Republicans than any other of the largest American public corporations. About ninety per cent of ExxonMobil’s PAC giving during the 2010 election cycle went to Republicans. An even higher percentage has gone to them this year, according to databases maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. Among the other large shareholder-owned corporations that maintain active PACs, Walmart, General Electric, Bank of America, and Ford gave about half or more of their contributions to Democrats during the 2010 cycle. Even Dow Chemical, historically wary of Democratic politicians, because of environmental and regulatory issues, directed about half of its PAC contributions to Democrats in the last cycle. Chevron and ConocoPhillips, the second- and third-largest American oil companies, gave to Democrats at twice the rate of ExxonMobil.

The evolution of the country’s biggest and most powerful oil company into a finance arm of the Republican Party is a story of both energy economics and style. ExxonMobil describes itself as a non-ideological corporation, yet it has developed an algorithmic formula for political spending and lobbying that has reinforced its alignment with Republican candidates in ways that Democrats could hardly see as anything but antagonistic. Over the past six years, the company has tried to adapt to the revival of the Democratic Party, but it has struggled to do so, in large part because of its own rigid internal culture.

ExxonMobil was created by a hostile act of the United States government. In 1911, the Supreme Court ordered the dismemberment of the Standard Oil monopoly, founded by John D. Rockefeller. Some of its executives, judging by the skepticism they express toward Washington, seem not to have got over the initial breakup. ExxonMobil’s chairman and chief executive, Rex Tillerson, who is active in the Boy Scouts of America, told the magazine Scouting recently that his favorite book is “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s dystopian 1957 novel, a touchstone for libertarians. The company has a culture of secrecy—with nondisclosure agreements and internal security that can make it seem like an intelligence agency. Company executives deflect press coverage; they sometimes withhold coöperation from congressional investigators, if the letter of the law allows; and when they speak in public, they typically read out sanitized, carefully edited speeches, or PowerPoint slides.

On March 23, 1989, the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker, ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The captain had been drinking, and he left the bridge shortly before midnight, in violation of company policies. His crew members became confused, attempted to turn the ship, and lost track of their position altogether. At a few minutes past twelve, there was a terrible sound. “Vessel aground. We’re fucked,” the chief mate called out.

The Valdez dumped more than two hundred thousand barrels of oil into the water. Soon, the pleading black eyes of oil-soaked sea otters became the symbols of a broad wildlife massacre. The Valdez disaster became a catalyst for reforms at ExxonMobil that still influence every aspect of its operations, including its approach to politics and lobbying. Almost since its founding, the company has emphasized procedure and orthodoxy. But after the wreck Exxon’s executives placed extraordinary emphasis on uniform, scientific, idiot-proof, automated systems of safety, management, finance, and business analysis.

Some of the reforms made the company resemble a cult. ExxonMobil departments worldwide organized regular safety meetings and competitions. Workers were awarded prizes for insuring that office clerks did not leave file drawers open, lest someone bump into them. Failing to turn off a coffee pot might draw a written reprimand. Cars had to be backed into parking spaces, so that in case of an emergency the driver could see clearly while speeding away. Group safety confessionals covered conduct beyond the workplace and included discussions of the correct use of a ladder while cleaning gutters at home and the danger of getting too much sun on a beach vacation. Employees stood up and shared stories of “near-misses” with personal accidents, as in a twelve-step recovery program. One manager who had been at the company for twenty-eight years recalled listening to a colleague confess that while cutting the grass in his yard he had mishandled his lawnmower, causing an object to fly out of it and strike his leg.

The atmosphere within ExxonMobil’s offices is one of studied formality; the corporate aesthetic suggests a Four Seasons hotel without many guests. At industry meetings, the ExxonMobil participants can usually be identified easily: the women in charcoal pants suits and the men in dark suits and white shirts, with short and proper haircuts. “They encouraged you to get married,” a former employee recalled. Such values were “not just a lot of lip service,” another longtime executive said. “J. D. Rockefeller went to church every Sunday and his employees better by God go to church on Sunday or they were not good employees.”

According to interviews with current and former ExxonMobil managers and lobbyists, the corporation’s political spending largely reflects the free-market outlook of its senior executives; virtually all of them joined the company out of college or graduate school and stayed on for life. ExxonMobil has engineered its free-market creed into a ranking and evaluation process, the “key vote system,” for directing political-action-committee contributions. The corporation’s public-affairs analysts identify important votes in Congress that affect ExxonMobil’s business interests; politicians are then rated on the basis of these votes. The corporation’s heavy spending on Republicans is the outcome of objective analysis, an executive involved in political strategy said. “We are a business-oriented PAC,” he told me. “Now, when you apply that litmus, our PAC is rightly criticized—that we tend to give more money to Republicans than to Democrats—but it is a result of the approach we take, and not a desired result.”

Exxon’s annual revenues, of more than four hundred billion dollars, are about the same as the gross domestic product of Norway. Since the nineteen-fifties, Exxon has always been in the top five on the annual Fortune 500 list. (In 1999, Exxon merged with Mobil, reuniting two Standard Oil descendants and forming the largest non-state-owned oil corporation in the world.) During the past decade, as global oil prices have risen, ExxonMobil’s profits have smashed records. It functions as a corporate state within the American state—constructing its own foreign, economic, and human-rights policies—and its executives are self-conscious about their sovereignty. Its business model—drilling holes in the ground all over the world and maintaining oil and gas wells profitably for up to forty years at a stretch—means that the political and economic time horizons for its corporate strategies extend much farther than those of almost any government. Lee Raymond, Tillerson’s predecessor, once remarked, “We see governments come and go.”

ExxonMobil’s headquarters are in Irving, Texas, on a placid campus near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Its Washington office is in a pink granite-and-concrete office building on K Street. A turret, topped by an American flag, distinguishes the building from the bland, conforming architecture of the capital’s lobbying corridor. Inside ExxonMobil’s suite, the furniture is dark cherry. Oil paintings of American landscapes line the walls; antique Mobil oilcans and signs for Esso decorate the shelves of conference rooms.

In 2005, Dan Nelson, a six-foot-eight former Marine officer who served in Vietnam, took charge of the Washington office. ExxonMobil has long relied mainly on career employees, not outside lobbyists. Last year, of the thirteen million dollars it disclosed that it spent on lobbying in Washington, only about twenty per cent went to outside consultants or influence-peddling firms. “I think we did it in-house so we could get it done right,” Joseph A. Gillan, who worked on environmental issues in the ExxonMobil office early in the Bush Administration, said.

During the Bush years, the corporation’s Washington strategists informally divided the capital’s officeholders into four tiers, in descending order of sympathy for ExxonMobil’s agenda. There were those who represented the oil patch—senators and congressmen from Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Wyoming. This group included, after 2000, President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. The second tier consisted of free-market Republicans who didn’t particularly understand the oil-and-gas industry but who generally supported ExxonMobil’s positions. The third tier consisted of Democrats or liberal Republicans who regularly voted against ExxonMobil’s interests but who were open to discussion and might be persuaded to vote the industry’s way. From 2001 to 2009, when Hillary Clinton served in the Senate, she fell into this category. Tier four was “the enemy,” as some of the military veterans in the K Street office occasionally put it. These were Democrats and environmental activists who, ExxonMobil’s executives believed, wanted to disenfranchise the corporation and use its unpopularity to galvanize liberal constituents and funders—senators such as Charles Schumer, of New York, and Dick Durbin, of Illinois.

Kenneth P. Cohen, ExxonMobil’s vice-president for public and government affairs, has overseen the corporation’s political-action committee for more than a decade. Cohen, who has worked at ExxonMobil since 1977, is a mild-looking man of modest height with a thick head of graying hair. His operating manual for political strategy is a dark binder that is kept on a shelf in his second-floor office at the Irving headquarters. The first page carries the title “Public Policy Issues.” A list of about two dozen subjects follows, from climate change to government subsidies for gasoline alternatives such as ethanol. For each policy area, the notebook contains a summary of ExxonMobil’s lobbying position, which the corporation’s public-affairs teams support worldwide, often using common language and PowerPoint slides. The notebook also provides a guide for judging American politicians.

During both the Bush and the Obama Administrations, ExxonMobil has concentrated its efforts in Washington on preventing certain tax and regulatory bills from being enacted, such as Obama’s proposal, this winter, to strip away industry tax advantages. The corporation has invested mainly in a blocking strategy, focussing its PAC donations on Republicans who can try to assure that no damaging laws go through. “Whoever’s in power in the House has almost dictatorial power,” a Washington consultant who has worked on oil-industry issues says. “If you control what’s going on in the House, you have huge influence over the final” legislation, as well as over the budgets and spending mandates that shape regulation.

In the past decade, the leading recipient of ExxonMobil PAC contributions has been Representative Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas, who has held senior positions on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where most legislation affecting the oil industry originates. Anne Northup, a former Republican congresswoman from Kentucky, who now serves on the Consumer Product Safety Commission, received the second-largest amount of campaign money. ExxonMobil’s ten leading campaign-contribution recipients in that decade were all House Republicans, according to research done by the journalist Ann O’Hanlon.

ExxonMobil’s political-action committee has not made contributions to recent Presidential campaigns, but its top executives have made it abundantly clear that they prefer Republicans in the White House. After President Bush won reëlection, the company donated a quarter of a million dollars to help fund the celebrations for his second inaugural.

“We need a conversation with Democrats,” Dan Nelson told his colleagues in the ExxonMobil office on K Street as the 2006 election neared. The company’s Washington analysts could see that the Democrats were gaining momentum, and the corporation’s unpopularity created a risk that Congress might enact a windfall tax or costly climate regulation. Leading Democratic election strategists were well aware of ExxonMobil’s investments in the Republican Party, and they openly criticized the corporation. “There is no question there is a new phase of scrutiny for Exxon,” Schumer, who was then chairing the Democratic Party’s Senate Campaign Committee, said.

Normally, one of the easiest ways to open a conversation with a member of Congress is to donate to his or her reëlection committee. The problem was that ExxonMobil made almost all of its contribution decisions on the mathematical analysis of the key vote system. Neither Obama (when he was in the Senate, after 2004) nor other leading Democrats heading for leadership positions in Congress or considering a Presidential run in 2008 scored very well. During the Bush Administration’s second term, not a single Democrat in Congress scored above fifty per cent. In the view of the system’s internal critics, it failed to distinguish adequately between truly key votes and routine party-line votes, and this skewed the numbers against Democrats. ExxonMobil lobbyists maintained strong ties with some Democrats from industrial states, like the Michigan congressman John Dingell, and with other Party members from Southern or conservative Western states who voted like Republicans on energy and tax issues. But the corporation’s Washington office was not well prepared for a House of Representatives ruled by Nancy Pelosi or influenced by the environmentalist Henry Waxman, both from California.