John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz

Opinion

Koch Brothers, Rove among the liberal’s bogeymen

It’s been years in the making, but all the hard work has paid off: “Koch,” as in the surname of the energy-billionaire brothers David and Charles, has become the liberal “abracadabra” of 2014 — the magic word that mesmerizes liberals into parting with their money and giving it to Democrats.

What’s especially interesting about it is how conscious Democrats appear to be that they’ve helped create this two-headed monster to scare their own people into coughing up dollars they might not give otherwise.

“Koch” now joins “Rove” and “Newt” in the Liberal Fund-raising Hall of Fame — in the very exclusive Demons of the Right-Wing Wing.

The Kochs give a lot of money to Republican candidates, and have helped organize others to give as well. But they’re far from the largest GOP donors; indeed, the leftist magazine Mother Jones in 2012 acknowledged that they are “significant, but not extraordinary, conservative donors.”

Certainly, they gave a lot less in that year than, say, Sheldon and Miri Adelson, who donated nearly $100 million in their impassioned effort to unseat President Obama and get Republicans into the Senate.

Nonetheless, it’s the Koch name that rings cash registers. The political writer Dave Weigel has produced serious evidence that if you mention the Kochs in an e-mail requesting campaign dollars, you may triple your haul.

He reports in Slate that one Democratic campaign sent out 24 fundraising e-mails from mid-January to mid-March. “Nineteen e-mails,” Weigel writes, “didn’t mention the Kochs. They raised, in total, $48,146.30.” Five e-mails did cite the Kochs, and “raised $32,668.72.”

The ones with Koch in them produced “an average of $6,533.74 per e-mail.” The non-Koch ones? A mere $2,534.02 per e-mail.

This means the invocation of “Koch” is sheer fund-raising gold, in an entirely negative way. “Koch” is used as a threat, a warning — only if you give to me can you stop the Kochs from taking over the Senate, the country, the known universe.

These e-mails go out to the Democratic Party faithful — an overwhelming percentage of whom have donated to politicians in the past. And they are clearly scared witless by the mere sight of the Koch name.

In one sense, it’s odd that they’d even know who the Kochs are — unless they live in New York, in which case they’d have reason to be grateful for David’s patronage of the arts (he is the largest single giver to Lincoln Center) and his $100 million contribution to New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

The Koch family mining and energy business is privately held. The brothers don’t seek the limelight. They give few interviews. And they don’t fit the standard-issue leftist profile of the evil right-winger, as David is libertarian in outlook.

So how did this happen? It dates back to a 2010 hit job in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, a veteran liberal slimer of the Right who tried to make the preposterous case that the Tea Party was a sinister creation of these malign oil-covered plutocrats. David Koch insisted that “no one representing the Tea Party ever even approached me,” and his claim has never been rebutted.

No matter. Within a year, the incredibly lame Will Ferrell political comedy “The Campaign” was featuring Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow as all-purpose Machiavellian villains called “The Motches,” whose power extends to rigging voting machines.

By 2012, the liberal commentariat was muttering constantly about the threat of the Koch brothers. Now, in 2014, the four years of Koch-bashing has become a paying proposition for Democratic candidates.

It’s a wildly successful Democratic tactic of longstanding, the fleshing-out of a hostile caricature into a full-fledged Satanic figure whose shadow then comes to seem amazingly large and threatening and must be counteracted, lest all humanity be plunged into Stygian darkness.

Newt Gingrich served the role after the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994; never before had, and never again will, a speaker of the House be as famous or as useful to his opponents. The name Gingrich raised far more money for Democrats fearing him than it did for Republicans who admired him.

So, too, the name “Rove,” which — owing to books claiming Bush aide Karl Rove was “Bush’s brain” and the president’s amoral puppetmaster — proved a bonanza for Democrats in 2004 and 2006.

Generally speaking, Republicans go right at their political enemies. In the 1990s, they raised money off Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and HillaryCare and Whitewater. In the Obama years, it’s been . . . Obama. And ObamaCare.

But liberals, it seems, just can’t get enough of the bogeymen they keep creating for themselves.