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Beyond the confines of
libertarian organizations, sailboat racing clubs, Manhattan socialite
circles and the borders of Kansas, the words “Koch brothers” didn’t mean
much to most Americans before 2010. That was when the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer
revealed to a broad audience how two of the four brothers — Charles and
David Koch — were building a multimillion-dollar shadow campaign
against President Barack Obama’s new administration.
Mayer’s piece, and the
subsequent tsunami of Koch coverage that followed, have thrust Charles
and David Koch into the mainstream political spotlight, turning them
from obscure, private businessmen into poster children for a new era of
big money politics.
Through their series of
closed-door seminars, in which an elite group of wealthy conservatives
and libertarians have gathered twice a year since 2003 to raise money
for right-wing causes, the Kochs have engineered a fundraising goliath
that spent $400 million against Democrats in the 2012 election alone.
While Vogel does a fine job
showcasing how both the left and the right have benefited from the new
system, no one, it appears, has gamed it better than the Kochs and their
network of donors.
“The Koch operation,” Vogel
writes, “was far more sophisticated than the actual Republican Party. It
was also more secretive, though, and tracing its ever-shifting contours
was an ongoing challenge for me and my colleagues in the press corps.”
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