Kochland Page 53

  Tea Parties first became part of the national conversation in February of that year, during a broadcast on the financial news network CNBC. The anchors were discussing the Obama administration’s proposal to modify many consumers’ mortgages after the crash made millions of houses worth less than the debt that was owed on them. The anchors cut to a commentator named Rick Santelli, who was reporting live from the trading floor of the CME Group in Chicago. Behind Santelli were rows of traders at desks, buying and selling futures contracts and other derivatives. They did not appear happy. Santelli was highly agitated, and expressed his contempt at the idea that the government might bail out homeowners who found themselves trapped in expensive mortgage agreements.

  “The government is promoting bad behavior!” Santelli shouted into the camera. He mocked the Obama administration while the traders around him clapped and cheered him on. Santelli turned and gestured back behind him toward the trading floor and shouted, “This is America!” And then he yelled to the traders: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

  The traders booed loudly, and Santelli turned to the camera to ask, “President Obama, are you listening?”

  “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July,” Santelli continued. “All you capitalists that want to show up at Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing. I think we’ll be dumping in some derivatives securities. What do you think about that?”

  The idea of throwing Tea Parties began to spread. The movement was organic and improvised, driven by people like Maria Brady. Ordinary people who had never been politically active reached out to friends and formed e-mail chains to stay in touch. Middle managers, housewives, plumbers, and even commodities traders began to organize.

  Maria and Michael Brady assembled an e-mail list of friends and neighbors and helped form the Boiling Springs Tea Party. They planned a Tea Party for Tax Day in mid-April. Maria ordered a costume for Michael, with a tricornered hat and an elegant jacket with golden lapels. When he wore the outfit, he looked like he’d stepped straight out of 1776. Hundreds of people showed up for the protest, even though it had been organized on short notice. Maria was amazed. When she held a placard in public for the first time, she felt more than happy. She felt a sense of belonging.

  “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she recalled. “I loved it. It was a trip. It felt good to realize that ‘Hey, I’m not by myself.’ ”

  In the weeks after the protest, members of the newly formed Tea Party chapter of Boiling Springs stayed in close contact. They planned a bigger rally, this one to be held on the Fourth of July.

  This time Maria and Michael had help. They connected with the South Carolina chapter of Americans for Prosperity. Tea Party groups around the nation were doing the same thing. Maria and Michael Brady were neither directed by Americans for Prosperity nor even inspired by Americans for Prosperity. But AFP provided its Tea Party groups and others with concrete means of assistance that amplified their message and energy in vitally important ways.

  Americans for Prosperity’s South Carolina chapter formed a Facebook page and website that became a central clearing hub for Tea Party activists. When people like Maria Brady threw up their arms and went to the Internet, they found the Americans for Prosperity site. It listed ways that they could get involved. It provided a platform to connect with fellow activists.

  The site promoted Maria and Michael’s upcoming Fourth of July protest, and it included Michael Brady’s name and telephone number for anyone interested in attending. The page also included a long list of other activists planning to hold protests on Independence Day. The AFP site also included a nationwide database listing the times and locations of town hall meetings that Congress members planned to host, encouraging the activists to attend. Bob Inglis’s town halls were on the list. The website included a form to fill out that automatically sent letters to member of the US Senate informing them to “vote no on cap and trade.”

  AFP chapters in New Jersey and elsewhere offered free chartered bus rides to protestors to attend a rally in Washington, DC, that summer. Once in Washington, protestors were given free box lunches and glossy protest signs. The protestors were joined by Tim Phillips, AFP’s president, who gave rousing rally speeches.

  This close coordination masked key points of disagreement between Tea Party activists and the political vision of Charles Koch. One of the very few rigorous studies of the Tea Party found that the political beliefs of the group were far from libertarian. Tea Party activists strongly supported popular entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, for example. They weren’t animated by a hatred of big government but by the belief that entitlement benefits were being unfairly diverted to people who didn’t work hard and didn’t deserve them. Their grievance was the exploitation of the middle class, not the existence of robust New Deal–era safety net programs. The racial tinge to the grievance was unmistakable, but also complicated. Many Tea Party chapters took great pains to avoid any racist language at their protests and welcomed minority members. But it was unmistakable that the unworthy beneficiaries of entitlements, in their eyes, were Hispanic immigrants and African-American residents of the inner city.

  Maria Brady, for one, had no idea who Charles Koch was in 2008. She didn’t study Hayek or von Mises or read papers from the Cato Institute. Instead, she began her political education on the Internet. The stories she found there were outrageous. She read that Nancy Pelosi had ordered two jumbo jet planes for her own use, and that Congress had approved of the purchase, using taxpayer money. Brady and her husband were paying for Nancy Pelosi’s private jet, and nobody was talking about it!II

  Brady did find one trusted source for news and education that was recommended to her by many friends and fellow patriots. She began to watch the television show of a commentator named Glenn Beck. “I kind of got an education. My start of my education was Glenn Beck, I guess. Because that’s the only person that was talking about the issues that I agreed with.”

  Glenn Beck was the most prominent voice in the American Tea Party movement, and understanding Beck’s political philosophy was critical to understanding the Tea Party and the relationship of the Tea Party to Charles Koch’s political efforts.

  Glenn Beck’s television show on Fox News drew close to three million viewers in 2009, beating the combined ratings of all his competitors’ shows. Beck spent many years honing his skills as a political entertainer on talk radio, where provocation was the currency of the realm. Debate was better than discussion. Suspense was better than satisfaction. Outrage was better than understanding. Glenn Beck elevated this genre to the level of high art. The narratives he spun on his show were terrifying and purported to reveal the broad contours of chilling global conspiracies. He affected the persona of a high school teacher, wearing a cheap, ill-fitting coat and tie. He stood in front of a chalkboard. During one show, the chalkboard displayed three logos: The United Nations symbol, the Islamic crescent, and the iconic Communist hammer and sickle. Beck explained that these three logos represented the three global movements that were currently hard at work to enslave and control his viewers.

  “The world is on fire,” Beck said in a remarkably casual and civil tone. “And there are three groups of people that want a new world order.”

  One of Beck’s favorite targets was the Obama administration’s efforts to promote alternative fuels, which Beck portrayed as a vast conspiracy to steal wealth from the middle class and transfer it to an elite group of liberal billionaires. The first phase of the conspiracy, Beck explained, was to fool everyone into thinking that human activity and the burning of fossil fuels was changing the world’s climate. Climate change was a lie, Beck said, perpetuated by dishonest scientists who cherry-picked and fabricated evidence.

  Americans for Prosperity helped promote this point of view. Phil Kerpen, AFP’s national director of policy, joined Glenn Beck on his show during the s
ummer of 2009 to help Beck analyze global warming and the clean energy conspiracy. Kerpen sat opposite Beck, near the chalkboard that was covered with a spiderweb of interlocking circles and arrows. The conspiracy outlined there was complex and involved several think tanks, government officials, nongovernmental organizations, and government programs. Beck reminded viewers that the clean energy crusade was meant to steal their liberty.

  “This is the head. This is the head. This is at least a main player in what is going on in America!” Beck exclaimed. Then he looked directly into the camera and said: “I believe, America, that this is probably the biggest—and correct me if I’m wrong . . . This is the biggest story in history. It is the hijacking of our republic. Yes or no?”

  Kerpen nodded his head in agreement. “I think you’re right,” Kerpen said. “And the shame, the amazing thing to me is, that they’re so brazen.”

  Beck was encouraged by these remarks, and incensed.

  “This is gigantic money! And let me tell you something, America. Nobody is doing this stuff on television,” Beck said. “It is the hijacking of our country.”

  Beck’s show informed Maria Brady’s self-education. She researched the Freemasons, paganism, and the US Senate. “Our government is running everything,” she said. “They were taking over everything, and they did a lousy job. Everything they put their little grimy hands on, they messed up. I am one hundred percent sure that what’s wrong is that the government controls everything.”

  This was von Mises on the retail level. Brady, in her way, was coming to the same conclusions that Charles Koch had come to many decades earlier. But she didn’t hold the antiseptic free-market views of an Austrian economist. Her Internet research led her to darker places.

  “I am totally convinced that probably seventy percent to seventy-five percent of our government is being run by Satan worshippers,” Brady said. “That’s what’s wrong with this country.”

  Maria Brady’s point of view did not lend itself to roomy political debate or to compromise with people of differing beliefs. She became a political activist who was unyielding and religiously dedicated to saving her country from evil forces.

  With the guidance and help of Americans for Prosperity, Brady found her first political target. It was the congressman from her district, who was running for reelection, named Bob Inglis.

  * * *

  When Bob Inglis held a town hall meeting in Boiling Springs, Maria Brady and her compatriots were prepared. Brady sent out an e-mail to her list, informing her fellow Tea Partyers about the event. When Brady arrived, she had a wad of small slips with the words “pink slip” written on them. She stood outside the event and passed out the pink slips to her friends. The idea was to throw these toward the stage at some point, signifying the fact that voters were ready to send Bob Inglis packing. Brady found a seat in the front row, so she was ready when Inglis took the stage and started speaking. She estimated that the crowd was between three hundred and four hundred people.

  For Brady, the pivotal moment came during the question and answer session. She wanted to know one thing: How could Bob Inglis vote to allow Nancy Pelosi to buy two luxury jets for her own use on the taxpayer’s dime? She took the microphone, and she asked this question, and she was horrified by his answer.

  “He didn’t know anything about it!” Brady recalled. “He looked at me, and he was like, ‘What? What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about this.’ ”

  This was the moment when Brady realized that she had to do everything in her power to make sure Inglis lost his seat in Congress. While it was untrue that Nancy Pelosi had purchased two jets, Brady was correct on one point: Inglis seemed utterly incapable of dealing with her question. He stood on the stage in a navy blazer and white button-down shirt, trying to talk in measured tones to a crowd that was shouting.

  One woman interrupted Inglis, shouting: “I’m afraid of Obama!” Inglis stopped and asked the woman: “Why are you afraid?” At this, the crowd erupted. A man shouted, “Because he’s a Socialist!”

  “Let me ask you something. This is very helpful,” Inglis said. “Where are you getting that?” He was smiling and waving his hand, acting like he was engaged in a collegial conversation about politics. Someone shouted that they were “getting that” from Glenn Beck.

  “Glenn Beck,” Inglis said. “Here’s what I’d suggest: turn that television off when he comes on.” This is when Inglis lost the crowd. They erupted in a wall of boos and shouts. Once again, he could barely be heard over the cacophony. He tried anyway.

  “Let me tell you why. He’s trading on fear. I think that when you trade on fear . . . you’re not leading. You’re following fearful people,” Inglis said. Brady remembered that moment because that’s when her friends started throwing their pink slips at Inglis.

  Inglis was not a stupid man or an inept politician. He knew how to work a room. The reason he failed repeatedly to win over the crowds at these town hall meetings was that he would not say what they wanted him to say. His campaign slogan for 2010 was “America’s sun is still rising.” This was a horrible slogan, and Inglis knew it. Nobody felt like the sun was still rising. He knew that he needed to say, “Okay, I hate Obama as much as you do. Even more than you do.” He knew that needed to be seen as “trying to bring back the good old days before the black man went into the White House,” as he phrased it. “I just didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to be the person who was saying that ‘Yeah, this is about the future of fuels. And I know we’re in the midst of the Great Recession, but we’re Americans and we can overcome this.’ ”

  Inglis kept his slogan and stayed the course.

  * * *

  Koch Industries’ activities in South Carolina were just one piece of a broader strategy, and a central focus of this effort was to defeat the Waxman-Markey bill before it could be passed by the US Senate. Steve Lonegan, AFP’s director in New Jersey, came to understand the broader strategy during conference calls and meetings with Koch’s political operatives. Koch Industries would ramp up its operations outside the Senate to turn up the heat on the politicians who worked there. The effort would employ all of Koch’s political assets, from its campaign donations to its lobbyists and even its think tanks.

  One immediate target would be the Republican lawmakers who voted for the Waxman-Markey bill in June. They would be made an example of, just like Inglis. There were eight of these Republicans in all, and three of them were from New Jersey: Congressmen Chris Smith, Leonard Lance, and Frank LoBiondo. Lonegan immediately set about making their political lives a living hell.

  LoBiondo’s office was flooded with phone calls criticizing him for his vote on Waxman-Markey, forcing one of his aides to fax between 100 and 150 summaries of the calls to LoBiondo each day. Many of the calls came from out of state. It was exasperating and exhausting to keep up with. Lonegan’s tactics went beyond those typically associated with political campaigns. He and his growing team taught the newly energized Tea Party activists how to inflict the maximum amount of pressure on the “Three Taxateers,” as he dubbed the congressmen.

  “You do a rally in his backyard. You get lots of people to call his office and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ E-mails, phone calls. You have them confronting him when he goes out to the diner. Again, this is where teaching people how to be good activists comes in. Most people don’t know what to do,” Lonegan said. “So, I would teach people.”

  The purpose of Lonegan’s effort was not necessarily to drive the Three Taxateers out of office. All three of them kept their seats. The goal was to send a message to the US senators. AFP targeted conservative Democrats such as Senator Max Baucus, who had a significant fossil fuel industry presence in their states. It also targeted wavering Republican senators. By tormenting the New Jersey congressmen, AFP showed that there was a steep price for supporting climate change regulations.

  When the bill moved into the Senate, it needed to first pass through one of the powerful Senate committ
ees. This presented a moment when the entire effort to regulate carbon emissions might be killed in the crib. Senate committee hearings did not draw much public attention. The committee hearings were slow and boring and filled with technical arcana. This delay in the process offered Koch the best chance to kill cap and trade. Koch Industries seized it.

  * * *

  The Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was a master of manipulating the political process. It was telling that he assigned the Waxman-Markey bill to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The committee was chaired by Barbara Boxer, a friend of environmental protections from California, and a true believer in the cap-and-trade system. The Democrats did not just control the committee, they held an overwhelming majority of its seats, with twelve Democratic votes to the Republicans’ seven. Republicans didn’t have much of a chance to stop the bill from being passed and sent to the entire Senate for a vote.

  Still, the leading Republican on the Environment Committee, James Inhofe, from Oklahoma, was not deterred. He had one advantage. The Senate was built in a way that maximized the power of the word no. The House of Representatives operated under the rules of a simple majority rule. The Senate was designed to thwart the idea of majority rule and prize consensus between the parties. It took sixty votes in the Senate to end debate on a topic. Bipartisanship wasn’t a virtue in this arena, it was a necessity.

  On the morning of the first Senate hearing, just after the Fourth of July recess, Inhofe took his seat at the center of the horseshoe-shaped committee dais, just next to Boxer. She began the hearing by preemptively criticizing Inhofe as an obstructionist. He didn’t hesitate to respond.