On the brink, with Erdoğan
Could Turkey push NATO to war with Russia in 2016?
By Michael Goldfarb
2015 is drawing to an end. The unanswered questions of the year — especially the ones related to ISIL, Syria and the massive flow of refugees from the region into Europe — are being carried over onto 2016’s balance sheet.
So are the unasked questions. Chief among them is, “For how long will you tolerate the government of Turkey, a member of NATO and would-be member of the EU, taking steps that make defeating ISIL, or Daesh, more difficult?”
And, as a supplementary question to the leaders of Europe, “Why are you buying off the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to gain its cooperation in dealing with all the problems arising from the disintegration of Syria? Shouldn’t his cooperation be part and parcel of membership in a democratic ‘alliance’?”
Around 800,000 people entered the EU via Turkey this year and at the end of November, EU leaders agreed to give their Turkish counterpart €3 billion in aid to help stem the flow. In addition, the leaders sweetened the pot with a new fast-track visa system for Turks traveling to Europe and agreeing to postpone publishing a progress report on Turkey’s human rights record that is part of ongoing talks on EU accession.
When the outline of the deal was made public in October, a Human Rights Watch analyst, Emma Sinclair Webb, wrote that “it is scandalous and short-sighted that the EU is willing to ignore the huge crackdown under way in Turkey in its attempt to secure a deal to keep out refugees.”
Webb was correct. Since the deal was signed, Erdoğan has continued his war on Turkey’s Kurdish population.
For much of December, the Turkish army has besieged the major towns and cities of southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish heartland of the country. The Turkish government says it is pursuing the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla group. The government’s tactics, though, look very much like collective punishment.
In Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of Turkey’s Kurdish population, a 10-day curfew was imposed. The historic center came under heavy attack.
Last week the town of Çizre, with a population of over 100,000, was encircled by tanks. The BBC World Service managed to get a phone call through to a municipal worker hiding with 26 other people in two rooms in the center of Çizre and interview him as bullets flew around the building and tank rounds came crashing in.
“It’s like the state has declared war on the people of Çizre,” Bahattin Yagarcik told the Newshour programme on December 22. It was an eerie echo of the kind of interview people heard coming from the besieged Syrian city of Homs in the early days of the revolt against Bashar al-Assad.
More details are difficult to come by because, since the EU has agreed to put the human rights report aside, local news agency reporters in the Kurdish southeast have been arrested and charged with spreading terrorist propaganda. The one Western reporter based in Diyarbakir, Friederike Geerdink, has been expelled from the country.
The arrests of prominent national journalists haven’t given EU or America leaders pause. On November 26, days before the summit with Erdoğan, Can Dündar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, and one of his reporters, were arrested and charged with treason. They are currently being held in solitary confinement.
Çizre straddles the Tigris and from the bridge over the river you can see Syria. It is easy to tell where Turkey ends and Syria begins by the fence and the guard towers placed at regular intervals along the border.
The proximity helps explain why Erdogan’s disproportionate assault on Turkey’s Kurds raises questions for European leaders and for U.S. President Barack Obama, beyond the obvious ones related to human rights abuses. If the fight with ISIL is the “generational struggle of our time” (© British Prime Minister David Cameron), why are the leaders tolerating the Turkish government going to war against the one group that has been successful at fighting ISIL on the ground?
More than a year ago, when the throat-slitters swept out of Syria, their advance into Iraq towards the oil installations around Kirkuk was halted at a dusty little town called Makhmour by PKK fighters. In the successful fight to force ISIL out of the Syrian town of Kobani, the PKK provided much needed support to the YPG, Syria’s Kurdish fighters.
There are a number of reasons why the anti-ISIL coalition failed to build on those successes, but Erdogan’s assault on the PKK, and his government’s unwillingness to facilitate contact between the Syrian and Turkish Kurds, is a considerable part of the problem.
In Erdogan’s view there is no difference between the groups.
“There are no good or bad terrorists; all terrorists are the same for Turkey. The matter is not only PKK … or ISIL. All the terrorist organizations in the region are working collectively,” Erdoğan told a Turkish news channel in late October.
Unfortunately, the PKK’s activities in decades past — when it was trying to bomb its way to an independent Kurdistan — keep it on the U.S. State Department and EU list of terrorist organizations. Earlier this month, the European Parliament voted to keep the PKK on the list.
Ironically, in March, the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, issued a statement from his Turkish cell urging his followers to replace “armed struggle with democratic politics.” It was analogous to the moment when Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams said the IRA’s armed struggle was over. Unfortunately, the Turkish government, and its extremely desperate allies, have been unable to reciprocate with the same generosity that the British government showed Adams.
Which means the ground force that everyone knows is necessary to fight ISIL is not in the field, and everyone is grasping at thin air for a solution to the ISIL problem.
And as President Erdoğan, who dominates all aspects of Turkish political life, slides through the degrees of authoritarianism and heads toward President for Life territory, the likelihood is that his high-handedness will add to the instability and danger created by the Syria/ISIL crisis.
Recently, Erdoğan has ordered troops into northern Iraq — without the invitation of the Iraqi government. This incident led Obama to publicly ask Turkey to “de-escalate tensions.” Erdoğan says they will remain, despite protests from Baghdad.
But that is small beer compared to a month ago, when a Turkish fighter jet shot down a Russian plane. Since then tensions have grown between the two countries. The Turkish newspaper Zaman reports of renewed tensions between the two countries in the south Caucasus, saying that defense officials in Ankara claim “it is only a matter of time before the tension over Nagorno-Karabakh relapses into war.”
If there is another incident — and given how crowded the skies along the Syria-Turkey border are, it can’t be ruled out — and Russia decides to retaliate by shooting down a Turkish jet, what happens then? Turkey is a NATO member and would be within its rights to invoke the Article 5 “collective defense” response.
Would the Alliance really go to war against Russia then?
That’s another question nobody asked at year’s end. I hope at least some of the Western Alliance’s leaders are thinking about the answer during the holidays.
December 30, 2015
Chokes coal
Polish government chokes on coal
Warsaw tries to figure out how to save jobs as coal spirals towards bankruptcy.
By Helena O'Rourke-Potocki
The Paris climate agreement underscoring that the era of fossil fuel is drawing to an end spells trouble for Poland, which is adamant that its economy will continue to be largely powered by coal far into the future.
The Polish government is already struggling to save the ailing coal industry, which is being hammered by high costs and a plunging world price that has the sector hemorrhaging red ink.
The Paris summit was in some ways a success for Warsaw, which helped strike the term “decarbonization” from the long-term goals. Instead, the climate deal calls for a “balance” between carbon dioxide emitted by human society and CO2 that is naturally absorbed, which for Environment Minister Jan Szyszko means it can make up for some emissions by planting lots of trees.
But despite the wording, the long-term goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the earlier 2 degrees goal, is spurring the European Commission to get even tougher on emissions.
Brussels’ goals, which the current Polish government hopes to water down, already call for the bloc to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030, for renewables to account for 27 percent of energy and for energy efficiency to increase by 27 percent.
Those EU negotiations will take place against Polish coal industry losses that amounted to €390 million in the first three-quarters of 2015. The industry has eye-watering debts of €3.5 billion. Piles of unsold coal are mounting near mines and power plants, while mining companies scramble to pay salaries and have slashed investment to almost nil.
Poland’s coal mines tend to be deep, old and expensive — a dire combination when global coal prices are plummeting. It costs about $75 to mine a ton of Polish coal, while the thermal coal price in Antwerp is hovering at around $50 a ton. A report by the Warsaw Institute of Economic Studies found the average Polish miner digs up 700 tons of coal a year; his U.S. counterpart produces 4,000.
“The coal industry in Poland requires immediate and decisive restructuring,” Polish MEP and former prime minister Jerzy Buzek told POLITICO.
Carbon-free ‘heresy’
The issue is more than economic, it’s also emotional and patriotic. Poland generates almost 90 percent of its electricity with coal, and the sector provides about 100,000 jobs. It also ensures energy independence — all of Poland’s crude and most of its natural gas comes from Russia.
In a recent speech, Andrzej Duda, the president, called talk of decarbonization — the idea that economies should eventually wean themselves off fossil fuel — “heresy.”
Speaking at a mining festival in Bełchatów in central Poland, the site of an enormous open-pit lignite mine linked to Europe’s largest coal-fired power plant, Duda rejected any limits on the mining and use of coal.
The previous government tried to rescue the country’s (and the EU’s) largest coal miner, Kompania Węglowa, a year ago with a plan to shut down expensive and unproductive mines and set up a slimmer and more profitable new company. But the idea of job losses enraged miners, and the plan came to little.
The new government, in power since October, approved a bill allowing the coal sector to continue functioning until 2019 without closing any mines, signed into law on Monday by Duda.
Meanwhile, losses at the mines continue to mount. Prime Minister Beata Szydło wants a special government agency to step in and buy up stockpiled coal to give mining companies a cash injection. However, the Agency for Material Reserves is in charge of managing strategic energy reserves, and coal isn’t on the list. Furthermore, most of the coal on stockpiles is either pledged as collateral to banks or pre-sold to the power sector.
The plan also risks falling foul of EU public assistance rules. Brussels has been in regular contact with Polish authorities over the past few months and took note of the government’s position.
“The Commission stands ready to assess any new proposals, if and when they are received, and continue the exchanges with the Polish authorities in a constructive manner,” said a Commission spokesperson.
The government is also encouraging state-controlled utilities to invest in coal mines. The previous administration fired the head of one electricity producer who wasn’t enthusiastic about sinking money into coal and the new government promises to be even tougher.
“There is a plan for mines together with energy to become a growing and modern sector,” said Szydło, adding: “Every mining job is important and every one will be defended.”
But those kinds of investments also need to pass muster with Brussels, or else they will be considered improper state aid.
“It is quite clear that all efforts directed at the restructuring of the coal industry must comply with EU competition legislation,” Buzek said.
Costly restructuring
Restructuring implies high job losses. Analysts estimate that employment will have to be cut almost in half, unproductive mines will have to be closed, and mines will have to invest heavily in modernization.
“The government’s promises are built on sand,” said Meri Pukarinen, head of the climate and energy unit at Greenpeace Poland. “There are no magic tricks to save the uncompetitive and oversized hard coal mining industry. The government must recognize the market situation and ensure a smooth transition for the workforce.”
Poland remains committed to coal being part of its energy mix for the long-term future, but that position is increasingly unpopular in the rest of the EU.
Poland is one of the few European countries building new coal-fired power plants — 14 are in various stages of planning and construction, although not all may be completed. The problem for mines is that these plants will replace obsolete old ones, and will be much more efficient in burning coal, which means that the market for Polish coal will continue to shrink.
Coal’s share of Polish energy will also continue to decline as the country ramps up renewables under pressure from the EU, and mulls the construction of a nuclear power plant.
“There is simply no way around today’s market reality — Europe is phasing out coal and seaborne coal markets are in oversupply due to shrinking coal demand globally in key markets, making Polish coal even more uncompetitive,” said Pukarinen.
Warsaw tries to figure out how to save jobs as coal spirals towards bankruptcy.
By Helena O'Rourke-Potocki
The Paris climate agreement underscoring that the era of fossil fuel is drawing to an end spells trouble for Poland, which is adamant that its economy will continue to be largely powered by coal far into the future.
The Polish government is already struggling to save the ailing coal industry, which is being hammered by high costs and a plunging world price that has the sector hemorrhaging red ink.
The Paris summit was in some ways a success for Warsaw, which helped strike the term “decarbonization” from the long-term goals. Instead, the climate deal calls for a “balance” between carbon dioxide emitted by human society and CO2 that is naturally absorbed, which for Environment Minister Jan Szyszko means it can make up for some emissions by planting lots of trees.
But despite the wording, the long-term goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the earlier 2 degrees goal, is spurring the European Commission to get even tougher on emissions.
Brussels’ goals, which the current Polish government hopes to water down, already call for the bloc to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030, for renewables to account for 27 percent of energy and for energy efficiency to increase by 27 percent.
Those EU negotiations will take place against Polish coal industry losses that amounted to €390 million in the first three-quarters of 2015. The industry has eye-watering debts of €3.5 billion. Piles of unsold coal are mounting near mines and power plants, while mining companies scramble to pay salaries and have slashed investment to almost nil.
Poland’s coal mines tend to be deep, old and expensive — a dire combination when global coal prices are plummeting. It costs about $75 to mine a ton of Polish coal, while the thermal coal price in Antwerp is hovering at around $50 a ton. A report by the Warsaw Institute of Economic Studies found the average Polish miner digs up 700 tons of coal a year; his U.S. counterpart produces 4,000.
“The coal industry in Poland requires immediate and decisive restructuring,” Polish MEP and former prime minister Jerzy Buzek told POLITICO.
Carbon-free ‘heresy’
The issue is more than economic, it’s also emotional and patriotic. Poland generates almost 90 percent of its electricity with coal, and the sector provides about 100,000 jobs. It also ensures energy independence — all of Poland’s crude and most of its natural gas comes from Russia.
In a recent speech, Andrzej Duda, the president, called talk of decarbonization — the idea that economies should eventually wean themselves off fossil fuel — “heresy.”
Speaking at a mining festival in Bełchatów in central Poland, the site of an enormous open-pit lignite mine linked to Europe’s largest coal-fired power plant, Duda rejected any limits on the mining and use of coal.
The previous government tried to rescue the country’s (and the EU’s) largest coal miner, Kompania Węglowa, a year ago with a plan to shut down expensive and unproductive mines and set up a slimmer and more profitable new company. But the idea of job losses enraged miners, and the plan came to little.
The new government, in power since October, approved a bill allowing the coal sector to continue functioning until 2019 without closing any mines, signed into law on Monday by Duda.
Meanwhile, losses at the mines continue to mount. Prime Minister Beata Szydło wants a special government agency to step in and buy up stockpiled coal to give mining companies a cash injection. However, the Agency for Material Reserves is in charge of managing strategic energy reserves, and coal isn’t on the list. Furthermore, most of the coal on stockpiles is either pledged as collateral to banks or pre-sold to the power sector.
The plan also risks falling foul of EU public assistance rules. Brussels has been in regular contact with Polish authorities over the past few months and took note of the government’s position.
“The Commission stands ready to assess any new proposals, if and when they are received, and continue the exchanges with the Polish authorities in a constructive manner,” said a Commission spokesperson.
The government is also encouraging state-controlled utilities to invest in coal mines. The previous administration fired the head of one electricity producer who wasn’t enthusiastic about sinking money into coal and the new government promises to be even tougher.
“There is a plan for mines together with energy to become a growing and modern sector,” said Szydło, adding: “Every mining job is important and every one will be defended.”
But those kinds of investments also need to pass muster with Brussels, or else they will be considered improper state aid.
“It is quite clear that all efforts directed at the restructuring of the coal industry must comply with EU competition legislation,” Buzek said.
Costly restructuring
Restructuring implies high job losses. Analysts estimate that employment will have to be cut almost in half, unproductive mines will have to be closed, and mines will have to invest heavily in modernization.
“The government’s promises are built on sand,” said Meri Pukarinen, head of the climate and energy unit at Greenpeace Poland. “There are no magic tricks to save the uncompetitive and oversized hard coal mining industry. The government must recognize the market situation and ensure a smooth transition for the workforce.”
Poland remains committed to coal being part of its energy mix for the long-term future, but that position is increasingly unpopular in the rest of the EU.
Poland is one of the few European countries building new coal-fired power plants — 14 are in various stages of planning and construction, although not all may be completed. The problem for mines is that these plants will replace obsolete old ones, and will be much more efficient in burning coal, which means that the market for Polish coal will continue to shrink.
Coal’s share of Polish energy will also continue to decline as the country ramps up renewables under pressure from the EU, and mulls the construction of a nuclear power plant.
“There is simply no way around today’s market reality — Europe is phasing out coal and seaborne coal markets are in oversupply due to shrinking coal demand globally in key markets, making Polish coal even more uncompetitive,” said Pukarinen.
Roosevelt Speech
The Speech That Set Off the Debate About America’s Role in the World
By Josh Zeitz
Seventy-five years ago this evening, on December 29, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—recently reelected to an unprecedented third term in office—took to the airwaves at 9:30 p.m. Eastern time to address an increasingly restive nation on the sobering topic of war mobilization. Across the Atlantic, Britain was engaged in a death struggle with Hitler’s Germany, which had already laid claim to vast regions of Europe, from France and the lowlands in the west to Poland in the east. In Asia, Japan had swallowed up large parts of China and cast a watchful eye toward the Central and South Pacific.
For over 36 minutes and 53 seconds, Roosevelt spoke to his captive audience about the imperative of American engagement in the conflict. Staying true to his campaign pledge of several weeks earlier, that America would not declare war on the Axis powers unless it were attacked, the president still made a forceful case for American military support to Britain. “If Great Britain goes down,” he warned, “the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the high seas. … It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.”
To preserve universal freedom, the president urged, “we must have more ships, more guns, more plans—more of everything. We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
A canny student of language, FDR had been holding the watchwords “arsenal of democracy” in check for the right moment. After hearing it roll off the tongue of French economist Jean Monnet (who likely coined it) earlier in the year, FDR’s confidant, Felix Frankfurter, secured Monnet’s agreement “not to use that phrase again.” Now by design, it entered America’s wartime lexicon as the living expression of the country’s march away from isolation.
FDR’s fireside chat laid the groundwork for America’s entry into the war less than a year later. Equally important, it sparked a vibrant debate over the meaning of America’s role in the world and, indeed, the very meaning of American freedom itself. Today, as America enters its 16th year of active military operations in the Middle East, and as the war on terror (at home and abroad) assumes greater prominence in the 2016 election cycle, the conversation that Roosevelt initiated so long ago remains surprisingly relevant.
In the months preceding his “arsenal of democracy” address, faced with a country that was divided about sending economic and military aid to Britain but very much against getting itself into the war, FDR worked assiduously to thread a very thin needle.
On June 1, weeks before France surrendered to Germany, Roosevelt unilaterally bypassed the Neutrality Act by declaring enormous caches of military equipment “surplus” and ordering that they be shipped with dispatch to Britain. He did so over the strong objections of his military advisers, including Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. When the secretary of war voiced concern about the legality of the order, the president ordered him to comply or resign. When Hap Arnold, a high-ranking Army general, repeated concerns that the order would adversely affect America’s war readiness, FDR told an aide that “if Arnold won’t comply, maybe we’ll have to move him out of town.” When the Navy’s judge advocate general balked at sanctioning the transfer, FDR instructed Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison to send the “sea lawyer” on a protracted vacation. (Edison refused, to which the president replied tartly, “forget it and do what I told you to do.”) Hugh Johnson, FDR’s former recovery chief and by then a committed isolationist, wasn’t far from the truth when he noted that the president was “shooting craps with destiny.”
In mid-September, amid the fall presidential canvass, FDR announced that he would exchange upwards of 50 American destroyers for two British naval bases and 99-year leases on several others. Again, he acted without congressional approval and in full circumvention of existing neutrality laws. Later that fall, with the endorsement of both Roosevelt and GOP presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, with substantial opposition in both houses.
Isolationists howled. Roosevelt, nearing the end of his third presidential campaign, publicly howled back, joyously deriding some of the most vocal anti-interventionists in speeches around the country.
Still, even in electoral victory, FDR understood that the country had little appetite for war. So it was on the evening of December 29, and in the coming weeks, that he began to articulate for the country his understanding of America’s broader role in the world. Neither the president nor his expansive radio audience could have anticipated the events of December 1941 (which would all but discredit isolationism as a public policy option and isolationists as a political group), but the conversation that Roosevelt inaugurated a year earlier in his “arsenal” speech signaled an emerging shift from surreptitious and legally questionable support for mobilization to full-throated advocacy for American involvement in the war. That conversation would in turn soon attract participants with quite divergent opinions about how such American involvement should unfold, and just what the purpose of American engagement should be.
During his fireside chat on December 29, FDR warned, “at this moment the forces of the states that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores.” The Axis powers represented the “revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny. In that there is no liberty, no religion, no hope. … It is not a government based upon the consent of the governed. It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and to enslave the human race.”
In effect, the president framed the war as a momentous struggle for the preservation of human liberty, even going so far as to invoke the specter of an institution (slavery) that cost the country millions of black and white lives before nearly destroying the American project. In this struggle, the United States was to provide the material means with which to save the free world.
Roosevelt further elevated the war’s meaning a week later, on January 6, 1941, when he famously declared before Congress that America was committed to extending “four essential human freedoms”—the famous freedoms to which he alluded six months earlier during an impromptu press conference at Hyde Park, and which would henceforth become an ideological and rhetorical cornerstone of America’s mobilization and war effort. As he did in a radio address in 1942, Roosevelt would frequently invoke the freedoms of speech and religion (and freedoms from want and fear) as fundamental liberties to be enjoyed by “men of every creed and every race, wherever they live” and identified America’s commitment to them as “the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today.”
For New Dealers—those who supported a stronger welfare state and civil rights for racially and disadvantaged groups, many of whom were already inclined to associate fascism abroad with conservatism at home—the Four Freedoms represented a clarion call to extend economic and civil liberties everywhere in the world. Certainly FDR believed this was so when he argued in November 1941 that “there can be no real freedom for the common man without enlightened social policies.”
Conservative internationalists, on the other hand, held starkly different ideas about what the four freedoms should augur.
Freedom of speech and religion were acceptable, conservatives typically argued, but freedom from fear and want were “New Deal Freedoms,” not “American Freedoms,” as they portended the expansion of a public-sector welfare state that made dependent children of otherwise sturdy and self-sufficient citizens. Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts, even proposed a Fifth Freedom—the “Freedom of Private Enterprise,” in the absence of which the four enumerated “by the President of the United States are meaningless.” For representatives of business and industry, World War II provided an opportunity, even an imperative, to save “free enterprise” from domestic and foreign enemies. Especially as the war effort cranked the American economy into full gear, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers drew direct linkage between the virtues of the free market and the political liberties for which soldiers and sailors were fighting and dying. One consumer advertisement went so far as to claim that the war’s purpose was to “hasten the day when you … can once more walk into any store in the land and buy anything you want.” To conservatives, freedom was more government restraint than government entitlements. In the context of 1941, as the United States awoke from an isolationist sleep and mobilized for war with a collection of authoritarian states, this position resonated with many Americans who looked askance at the New Deal’s vast expansion of government authority and prerogative.
On February 17, 1941, the influential American publisher Henry Luce gave expression to the conservative interpretation of the war when he introduced the idea of an “American Century” into the national lexicon. Writing in his popular magazine, Time, Luce predicted that the United States would emerge from the war as a “dominant power in the world,” with a mission to evangelize “free economic enterprise” and “the abundant life” around the globe. Not only by its economic, military and industrial might would America come to press its influence, but also by its dynamic cultural force. In effect, his article represented a powerful attempt to distance conservatism from isolationism and to distance internationalism from the New Deal.
“Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism,” Luce insisted, “we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways—in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world.”
Every bit as much as Roosevelt’s pledge to make America the world’s “arsenal of democracy” or his herald of a world guided by four freedoms, Luce’s formulation came to dominate public discourse during and after the war. His essay was not necessarily at odds with Roosevelt’s rhetoric—indeed, it implored that “for every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic effort to feed the world. … Every farmer in America should be encouraged to produce all the crops he can, and all that we cannot eat—and perhaps some of us could eat less—should forthwith be dispatched to the four quarters of the globe as a free gift, administered by a humanitarian army of Americans, to every man, woman and child on this earth who is really hungry.” Luce’s American Century would be secured not only by military might, but by “engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.”
But given his wider reputation as a conservative Republican, when Luce extolled America’s “love of freedom,” “feeling for the equality of opportunity” and “tradition of self-reliance and independence,” some New Dealers worried that he might hijack the conflict in Europe for the exclusive benefit of private industry. Their vision of a postwar peace anticipated more expansive rights and entitlements for ordinary citizens, not new markets and resources for American companies.
In 1942, following America’s entry into the war, Vice President Henry Wallace, one of the most progressive members of Roosevelt’s administration, issued a response to Luce. “Some have spoken of the American Century,” Wallace wrote. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come of this war—can and must be the century of the common man.” In such a world, “no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations,” and “older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither economic or military imperialism.” Wallace’s vision closely mirrored the most ardent hopes of New Dealers, who looked forward to a world order in which established governments helped free people everywhere from hunger, unemployment, sickness and political oppression.
The vice president and Luce weren’t necessarily in disagreement, but they placed sharp emphasis on different virtues. For Luce, World War II would introduce an era in which free enterprise, fashioned in the American way and exported by American institutions, would secure a new form of freedom and democracy for all the world to enjoy. For Wallace, the war would unlock a universal New Deal to be enjoyed across all four corners of the map. In such a future, America would shoulder moral responsibilities, but it would not emerge as the world’s economic hegemon, policeman or culture factory.
Luce and Wallace had both agreed with the president that America would inevitably and necessarily enter the war and that the war, in turn, would create a vastly different world from that which preceded it. But what that world would look like was a question on which New Dealers and conservatives sharply differed.
In his closing lines on December 29, Roosevelt shared his “profound conviction that the American people are now determined to put forth a mightier effort than they have ever yet made to … meet the threat to our democratic faith.”
By challenging the nation to become an “arsenal of democracy,” and in later cataloging four broad and interpretable freedoms that should guide its emergence as a global power, FDR ignited a vibrant discussion about the very meaning of words like “democracy” and “freedom” and provided citizens with a new framework by which to consider, debate and envision their place in the world. Those deliberations remain relevant even today, as we enter the last quarter of the American Century.
Over the past decade and a half, the United States has devoted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to the business of exporting “freedom” and “democracy”—terms that politicians and pundits employ loosely, as though their definition were universal. As in 1940, the lexicon of democracy is malleable enough to accommodate materially different understandings of what it means to export and promote American values. As in 1940 and 1941, agreement that we should fight does not equate to consensus about what we’re fighting for. The national discussion that FDR opened 75 years ago rages on, and remains as essential now as it was then. There’s no shame in waging that discussion loudly—only in not having it at all.
By Josh Zeitz
Seventy-five years ago this evening, on December 29, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—recently reelected to an unprecedented third term in office—took to the airwaves at 9:30 p.m. Eastern time to address an increasingly restive nation on the sobering topic of war mobilization. Across the Atlantic, Britain was engaged in a death struggle with Hitler’s Germany, which had already laid claim to vast regions of Europe, from France and the lowlands in the west to Poland in the east. In Asia, Japan had swallowed up large parts of China and cast a watchful eye toward the Central and South Pacific.
For over 36 minutes and 53 seconds, Roosevelt spoke to his captive audience about the imperative of American engagement in the conflict. Staying true to his campaign pledge of several weeks earlier, that America would not declare war on the Axis powers unless it were attacked, the president still made a forceful case for American military support to Britain. “If Great Britain goes down,” he warned, “the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the high seas. … It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.”
To preserve universal freedom, the president urged, “we must have more ships, more guns, more plans—more of everything. We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
A canny student of language, FDR had been holding the watchwords “arsenal of democracy” in check for the right moment. After hearing it roll off the tongue of French economist Jean Monnet (who likely coined it) earlier in the year, FDR’s confidant, Felix Frankfurter, secured Monnet’s agreement “not to use that phrase again.” Now by design, it entered America’s wartime lexicon as the living expression of the country’s march away from isolation.
FDR’s fireside chat laid the groundwork for America’s entry into the war less than a year later. Equally important, it sparked a vibrant debate over the meaning of America’s role in the world and, indeed, the very meaning of American freedom itself. Today, as America enters its 16th year of active military operations in the Middle East, and as the war on terror (at home and abroad) assumes greater prominence in the 2016 election cycle, the conversation that Roosevelt initiated so long ago remains surprisingly relevant.
In the months preceding his “arsenal of democracy” address, faced with a country that was divided about sending economic and military aid to Britain but very much against getting itself into the war, FDR worked assiduously to thread a very thin needle.
On June 1, weeks before France surrendered to Germany, Roosevelt unilaterally bypassed the Neutrality Act by declaring enormous caches of military equipment “surplus” and ordering that they be shipped with dispatch to Britain. He did so over the strong objections of his military advisers, including Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. When the secretary of war voiced concern about the legality of the order, the president ordered him to comply or resign. When Hap Arnold, a high-ranking Army general, repeated concerns that the order would adversely affect America’s war readiness, FDR told an aide that “if Arnold won’t comply, maybe we’ll have to move him out of town.” When the Navy’s judge advocate general balked at sanctioning the transfer, FDR instructed Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison to send the “sea lawyer” on a protracted vacation. (Edison refused, to which the president replied tartly, “forget it and do what I told you to do.”) Hugh Johnson, FDR’s former recovery chief and by then a committed isolationist, wasn’t far from the truth when he noted that the president was “shooting craps with destiny.”
In mid-September, amid the fall presidential canvass, FDR announced that he would exchange upwards of 50 American destroyers for two British naval bases and 99-year leases on several others. Again, he acted without congressional approval and in full circumvention of existing neutrality laws. Later that fall, with the endorsement of both Roosevelt and GOP presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, with substantial opposition in both houses.
Isolationists howled. Roosevelt, nearing the end of his third presidential campaign, publicly howled back, joyously deriding some of the most vocal anti-interventionists in speeches around the country.
Still, even in electoral victory, FDR understood that the country had little appetite for war. So it was on the evening of December 29, and in the coming weeks, that he began to articulate for the country his understanding of America’s broader role in the world. Neither the president nor his expansive radio audience could have anticipated the events of December 1941 (which would all but discredit isolationism as a public policy option and isolationists as a political group), but the conversation that Roosevelt inaugurated a year earlier in his “arsenal” speech signaled an emerging shift from surreptitious and legally questionable support for mobilization to full-throated advocacy for American involvement in the war. That conversation would in turn soon attract participants with quite divergent opinions about how such American involvement should unfold, and just what the purpose of American engagement should be.
During his fireside chat on December 29, FDR warned, “at this moment the forces of the states that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores.” The Axis powers represented the “revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny. In that there is no liberty, no religion, no hope. … It is not a government based upon the consent of the governed. It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and to enslave the human race.”
In effect, the president framed the war as a momentous struggle for the preservation of human liberty, even going so far as to invoke the specter of an institution (slavery) that cost the country millions of black and white lives before nearly destroying the American project. In this struggle, the United States was to provide the material means with which to save the free world.
Roosevelt further elevated the war’s meaning a week later, on January 6, 1941, when he famously declared before Congress that America was committed to extending “four essential human freedoms”—the famous freedoms to which he alluded six months earlier during an impromptu press conference at Hyde Park, and which would henceforth become an ideological and rhetorical cornerstone of America’s mobilization and war effort. As he did in a radio address in 1942, Roosevelt would frequently invoke the freedoms of speech and religion (and freedoms from want and fear) as fundamental liberties to be enjoyed by “men of every creed and every race, wherever they live” and identified America’s commitment to them as “the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today.”
For New Dealers—those who supported a stronger welfare state and civil rights for racially and disadvantaged groups, many of whom were already inclined to associate fascism abroad with conservatism at home—the Four Freedoms represented a clarion call to extend economic and civil liberties everywhere in the world. Certainly FDR believed this was so when he argued in November 1941 that “there can be no real freedom for the common man without enlightened social policies.”
Conservative internationalists, on the other hand, held starkly different ideas about what the four freedoms should augur.
Freedom of speech and religion were acceptable, conservatives typically argued, but freedom from fear and want were “New Deal Freedoms,” not “American Freedoms,” as they portended the expansion of a public-sector welfare state that made dependent children of otherwise sturdy and self-sufficient citizens. Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts, even proposed a Fifth Freedom—the “Freedom of Private Enterprise,” in the absence of which the four enumerated “by the President of the United States are meaningless.” For representatives of business and industry, World War II provided an opportunity, even an imperative, to save “free enterprise” from domestic and foreign enemies. Especially as the war effort cranked the American economy into full gear, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers drew direct linkage between the virtues of the free market and the political liberties for which soldiers and sailors were fighting and dying. One consumer advertisement went so far as to claim that the war’s purpose was to “hasten the day when you … can once more walk into any store in the land and buy anything you want.” To conservatives, freedom was more government restraint than government entitlements. In the context of 1941, as the United States awoke from an isolationist sleep and mobilized for war with a collection of authoritarian states, this position resonated with many Americans who looked askance at the New Deal’s vast expansion of government authority and prerogative.
On February 17, 1941, the influential American publisher Henry Luce gave expression to the conservative interpretation of the war when he introduced the idea of an “American Century” into the national lexicon. Writing in his popular magazine, Time, Luce predicted that the United States would emerge from the war as a “dominant power in the world,” with a mission to evangelize “free economic enterprise” and “the abundant life” around the globe. Not only by its economic, military and industrial might would America come to press its influence, but also by its dynamic cultural force. In effect, his article represented a powerful attempt to distance conservatism from isolationism and to distance internationalism from the New Deal.
“Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism,” Luce insisted, “we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways—in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world.”
Every bit as much as Roosevelt’s pledge to make America the world’s “arsenal of democracy” or his herald of a world guided by four freedoms, Luce’s formulation came to dominate public discourse during and after the war. His essay was not necessarily at odds with Roosevelt’s rhetoric—indeed, it implored that “for every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic effort to feed the world. … Every farmer in America should be encouraged to produce all the crops he can, and all that we cannot eat—and perhaps some of us could eat less—should forthwith be dispatched to the four quarters of the globe as a free gift, administered by a humanitarian army of Americans, to every man, woman and child on this earth who is really hungry.” Luce’s American Century would be secured not only by military might, but by “engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.”
But given his wider reputation as a conservative Republican, when Luce extolled America’s “love of freedom,” “feeling for the equality of opportunity” and “tradition of self-reliance and independence,” some New Dealers worried that he might hijack the conflict in Europe for the exclusive benefit of private industry. Their vision of a postwar peace anticipated more expansive rights and entitlements for ordinary citizens, not new markets and resources for American companies.
In 1942, following America’s entry into the war, Vice President Henry Wallace, one of the most progressive members of Roosevelt’s administration, issued a response to Luce. “Some have spoken of the American Century,” Wallace wrote. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come of this war—can and must be the century of the common man.” In such a world, “no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations,” and “older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither economic or military imperialism.” Wallace’s vision closely mirrored the most ardent hopes of New Dealers, who looked forward to a world order in which established governments helped free people everywhere from hunger, unemployment, sickness and political oppression.
The vice president and Luce weren’t necessarily in disagreement, but they placed sharp emphasis on different virtues. For Luce, World War II would introduce an era in which free enterprise, fashioned in the American way and exported by American institutions, would secure a new form of freedom and democracy for all the world to enjoy. For Wallace, the war would unlock a universal New Deal to be enjoyed across all four corners of the map. In such a future, America would shoulder moral responsibilities, but it would not emerge as the world’s economic hegemon, policeman or culture factory.
Luce and Wallace had both agreed with the president that America would inevitably and necessarily enter the war and that the war, in turn, would create a vastly different world from that which preceded it. But what that world would look like was a question on which New Dealers and conservatives sharply differed.
In his closing lines on December 29, Roosevelt shared his “profound conviction that the American people are now determined to put forth a mightier effort than they have ever yet made to … meet the threat to our democratic faith.”
By challenging the nation to become an “arsenal of democracy,” and in later cataloging four broad and interpretable freedoms that should guide its emergence as a global power, FDR ignited a vibrant discussion about the very meaning of words like “democracy” and “freedom” and provided citizens with a new framework by which to consider, debate and envision their place in the world. Those deliberations remain relevant even today, as we enter the last quarter of the American Century.
Over the past decade and a half, the United States has devoted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to the business of exporting “freedom” and “democracy”—terms that politicians and pundits employ loosely, as though their definition were universal. As in 1940, the lexicon of democracy is malleable enough to accommodate materially different understandings of what it means to export and promote American values. As in 1940 and 1941, agreement that we should fight does not equate to consensus about what we’re fighting for. The national discussion that FDR opened 75 years ago rages on, and remains as essential now as it was then. There’s no shame in waging that discussion loudly—only in not having it at all.
Genocide
Clinton breaks with Obama over 'genocide' of Middle East Christians
'I will because we now have enough evidence,' Clinton said.
By Hanna Trudo
Hillary Clinton broke with President Barack Obama over the plight of Christians and other ethnic and religious minority groups in the Middle East, telling a New Hampshire crowd that the Islamic State's persecution of them should be labeled a "genocide."
Her comments, which came during town hall meeting on Tuesday night in Berlin, in the state's far north, came in response to a voter's question, according to the Associated Press.
"Will you join those leaders, faith leaders and secular leaders and political leaders from both the right and the left, in calling what is happening by its proper name: Genocide?" the voter asked.
"I will because we now have enough evidence," Clinton said, acknowledging that she had been reluctant to do so because the term has "broad implications."
It's clear, Clinton said, that there is a brutally violent campaign "deliberately aimed at destroying not only the lives, but wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East in territory controlled by ISIS."
Clinton's remarks come as the Obama administration faces growing calls to declare that the Islamic State is committing genocide against Christians, a move that could increase pressure on the president to take action to protect victims of the terrorist group.
The State Department has spent months debating whether to label the Islamic State’s attacks against members of a different religious minority, the Yazidis, a "genocide," a designation that carries significant legal, political and historical implications. Christian groups and Republicans have urged Secretary of State John Kerry to include Iraqi and Syrian Christians as well.
Last week, Obama nodded to those concerns as he highlighted the plight of the region's Christians in an unusually somber Christmas Day message. “In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent; this silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL,” he said.
The president's statement came hours after more than two dozen House members from both parties sent Kerry a letter noting their worry that the State Department might omit Christians and other religious minorities from the genocide designation. The letter, spearheaded by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), noted a finding by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom that Christian communities in ISIL-controlled areas are facing genocide along with Yazidi, Shia, Turkmen, and Shabak minority groups.
A genocide designation comes with legal ramifications for the United States, and Congress should be consulted, the members wrote. “We will continue to insist that any genocide finding must reflect the actual experience of all minorities whose communities are being erased and whose families are being slaughtered because of their faith,” the letter concludes.
'I will because we now have enough evidence,' Clinton said.
By Hanna Trudo
Hillary Clinton broke with President Barack Obama over the plight of Christians and other ethnic and religious minority groups in the Middle East, telling a New Hampshire crowd that the Islamic State's persecution of them should be labeled a "genocide."
Her comments, which came during town hall meeting on Tuesday night in Berlin, in the state's far north, came in response to a voter's question, according to the Associated Press.
"Will you join those leaders, faith leaders and secular leaders and political leaders from both the right and the left, in calling what is happening by its proper name: Genocide?" the voter asked.
"I will because we now have enough evidence," Clinton said, acknowledging that she had been reluctant to do so because the term has "broad implications."
It's clear, Clinton said, that there is a brutally violent campaign "deliberately aimed at destroying not only the lives, but wiping out the existence of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East in territory controlled by ISIS."
Clinton's remarks come as the Obama administration faces growing calls to declare that the Islamic State is committing genocide against Christians, a move that could increase pressure on the president to take action to protect victims of the terrorist group.
The State Department has spent months debating whether to label the Islamic State’s attacks against members of a different religious minority, the Yazidis, a "genocide," a designation that carries significant legal, political and historical implications. Christian groups and Republicans have urged Secretary of State John Kerry to include Iraqi and Syrian Christians as well.
Last week, Obama nodded to those concerns as he highlighted the plight of the region's Christians in an unusually somber Christmas Day message. “In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent; this silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL,” he said.
The president's statement came hours after more than two dozen House members from both parties sent Kerry a letter noting their worry that the State Department might omit Christians and other religious minorities from the genocide designation. The letter, spearheaded by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), noted a finding by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom that Christian communities in ISIL-controlled areas are facing genocide along with Yazidi, Shia, Turkmen, and Shabak minority groups.
A genocide designation comes with legal ramifications for the United States, and Congress should be consulted, the members wrote. “We will continue to insist that any genocide finding must reflect the actual experience of all minorities whose communities are being erased and whose families are being slaughtered because of their faith,” the letter concludes.
Spying situation
Rubio: Spying situation 'might be worse' than what public thinks
By Nick Gass
Marco Rubio treaded carefully on Wednesday in addressing a report from The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. government continued to spy on some leaders of allied nations, including Israel, and collected communications of members of Congress in the process.
But he also warned that the full picture "might be worse," remarking that he did not think the report "gets the entire story."
Appearing on "Fox and Friends" ahead of a campaign event in Pella, Iowa, Rubio, who is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reiterated on more than one occasion that he wanted to be "very careful" about discussing the politically fraught topic.
"Well I want to be very careful. I’m on, a member of the Intelligence Committee, so obviously I want to be very careful of what I say about information of this kind. Obviously people read this report, they have a right to be concerned this morning about it," he said of the Journal's story with the headline "U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress."
"They have a right to be concerned about the fact that while some leaders around the world are no longer being targeted, one of our strongest allies in the Middle East—Israel—is," he remarked. "These are all concerns, and they’re legitimate."
However, Rubio continued, the latest episode illustrates "one of those complicated issues when it comes to intelligence matters."
"We have to be very careful about how we discuss it, especially since there’s a press report that I don’t think gets the entire story," he said, adding that he was not defending the White House.
"I actually think it might be worse than what some people might think, but this is an issue that we’ll keep a close eye on, and the role that I have in the Intelligence Committee," he said. "But. I’m not trying to be evasive, but I want to be very careful in a national broadcast like this how we discuss these sorts of issues."
By Nick Gass
Marco Rubio treaded carefully on Wednesday in addressing a report from The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. government continued to spy on some leaders of allied nations, including Israel, and collected communications of members of Congress in the process.
But he also warned that the full picture "might be worse," remarking that he did not think the report "gets the entire story."
Appearing on "Fox and Friends" ahead of a campaign event in Pella, Iowa, Rubio, who is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, reiterated on more than one occasion that he wanted to be "very careful" about discussing the politically fraught topic.
"Well I want to be very careful. I’m on, a member of the Intelligence Committee, so obviously I want to be very careful of what I say about information of this kind. Obviously people read this report, they have a right to be concerned this morning about it," he said of the Journal's story with the headline "U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress."
"They have a right to be concerned about the fact that while some leaders around the world are no longer being targeted, one of our strongest allies in the Middle East—Israel—is," he remarked. "These are all concerns, and they’re legitimate."
However, Rubio continued, the latest episode illustrates "one of those complicated issues when it comes to intelligence matters."
"We have to be very careful about how we discuss it, especially since there’s a press report that I don’t think gets the entire story," he said, adding that he was not defending the White House.
"I actually think it might be worse than what some people might think, but this is an issue that we’ll keep a close eye on, and the role that I have in the Intelligence Committee," he said. "But. I’m not trying to be evasive, but I want to be very careful in a national broadcast like this how we discuss these sorts of issues."
Need to ask
Five questions the candidates need to be asked, immediately
The presidential race has been ignoring education. That needs to stop.
By Arne Duncan
The people who want to lead this country when President Obama leaves office have gathered eight times to debate issues that matter to Americans. They’ve argued over foreign policy, the economy and immigration.
But education – one of the most critical issues to the future of the United States – has been largely ignored.
Those other topics are important, certainly. As a nation, a strong military is our best defense, but our best offense is education—a great system that leads to success in college, careers, and life for all students, no matter their zip code. That’s the only way to ensure our economic future. And it matters not just in our choice of President, but in elections at every level.
Americans are used to thinking of their nation as a model for the world, so it might be surprising to realize how our education system is seen by our global competitors. Each year, we bring the education leaders of two dozen countries together for the International Summit on the Teaching Profession. Often, I am asked: Why doesn’t the United States value its children more? They point to our lack of investment in early childhood education and our low college completion rates. It’s heartbreaking.
In the coming year, America has the opportunity to start turning that reputation around by having an honest political debate on education.
I’ve often said that no political party has a monopoly on good ideas in education – left or right, Republican or Democratic. Imagine the possibilities if we have a genuine conversation about how to move forward as a country. This means pushing our candidates to tell us their plans for making sure students – particularly underserved students – can thrive.
There has been so much change in American classrooms in the last seven years, and the stage is set for even more progress. In many ways I have never been more hopeful, more encouraged by what lies ahead. This country has made incredible strides in the last seven years. High school graduation rates are at all-time highs, and the gap for traditionally underserved students graduating is narrowing. Dropout rates are down. An additional 1 million black and Latino students have enrolled in college. We are headed in the right direction, but we aren’t getting there fast enough.
The next administration will be critical to continuing that upward trend, yet we know very little about how the people who want to be president ensure that happens. With other countries passing us by, we don’t have any time to waste. We must do better, and we must get there faster.
But there is so little discussion of how that can play out in our electoral choices.
In fact, education has come up just a handful of times during the televised presidential debates, and none of the questions has gotten to the heart of how we as a country can move forward. It’s time to change that.
I want to be clear: The candidates aren’t solely to blame for the lack of discussion on education. We as voters are, also. We should demand more of the people running for office, from local to state to federal government. We – and reporters and analysts covering debates – should be asking: Why isn’t education – the foundation for economic prosperity in any country – a central issue in every political race?
It’s time for media outlets sponsoring presidential debates to step up to the challenge of holding candidates accountable for answering hard questions about education policy.
So what should they ask? Every candidate should be able to answer four basic questions about education, and then should be able to back up their proposals with how they plan to get them done. In the last few months, I have talked to multiple news outlets and encouraged them to ask the candidates the following:
President Obama had the courage to push for what he believed was right, even at the risk of upsetting supporters of his own party. Who will be so bold in 2016?
The presidential race has been ignoring education. That needs to stop.
By Arne Duncan
The people who want to lead this country when President Obama leaves office have gathered eight times to debate issues that matter to Americans. They’ve argued over foreign policy, the economy and immigration.
But education – one of the most critical issues to the future of the United States – has been largely ignored.
Those other topics are important, certainly. As a nation, a strong military is our best defense, but our best offense is education—a great system that leads to success in college, careers, and life for all students, no matter their zip code. That’s the only way to ensure our economic future. And it matters not just in our choice of President, but in elections at every level.
Americans are used to thinking of their nation as a model for the world, so it might be surprising to realize how our education system is seen by our global competitors. Each year, we bring the education leaders of two dozen countries together for the International Summit on the Teaching Profession. Often, I am asked: Why doesn’t the United States value its children more? They point to our lack of investment in early childhood education and our low college completion rates. It’s heartbreaking.
In the coming year, America has the opportunity to start turning that reputation around by having an honest political debate on education.
I’ve often said that no political party has a monopoly on good ideas in education – left or right, Republican or Democratic. Imagine the possibilities if we have a genuine conversation about how to move forward as a country. This means pushing our candidates to tell us their plans for making sure students – particularly underserved students – can thrive.
There has been so much change in American classrooms in the last seven years, and the stage is set for even more progress. In many ways I have never been more hopeful, more encouraged by what lies ahead. This country has made incredible strides in the last seven years. High school graduation rates are at all-time highs, and the gap for traditionally underserved students graduating is narrowing. Dropout rates are down. An additional 1 million black and Latino students have enrolled in college. We are headed in the right direction, but we aren’t getting there fast enough.
The next administration will be critical to continuing that upward trend, yet we know very little about how the people who want to be president ensure that happens. With other countries passing us by, we don’t have any time to waste. We must do better, and we must get there faster.
But there is so little discussion of how that can play out in our electoral choices.
In fact, education has come up just a handful of times during the televised presidential debates, and none of the questions has gotten to the heart of how we as a country can move forward. It’s time to change that.
I want to be clear: The candidates aren’t solely to blame for the lack of discussion on education. We as voters are, also. We should demand more of the people running for office, from local to state to federal government. We – and reporters and analysts covering debates – should be asking: Why isn’t education – the foundation for economic prosperity in any country – a central issue in every political race?
It’s time for media outlets sponsoring presidential debates to step up to the challenge of holding candidates accountable for answering hard questions about education policy.
So what should they ask? Every candidate should be able to answer four basic questions about education, and then should be able to back up their proposals with how they plan to get them done. In the last few months, I have talked to multiple news outlets and encouraged them to ask the candidates the following:
- Today we are 27th in the world in access to preschool. What’s your goal for preschool access in the next five years?
- High school graduation rates are the highest ever at 82 percent, but they are not nearly high enough. What’s your goal for high school completion in the next five years?
- Today, far too many students graduate high school and still need remedial classes in college. What’s your goal for true college readiness in the next five years?
- A generation ago, we were the world leader in the college graduation rate of our young people; today, we are 13th. What’s your goal for the next five years?
- Finally, for each of these goals, what are your concrete strategies to achieve them, and what financial resources and political capital are you willing to expend to get us there?
President Obama had the courage to push for what he believed was right, even at the risk of upsetting supporters of his own party. Who will be so bold in 2016?
Rip into Rubio
Establishment rivals rip into Rubio
Sensing that he’s the biggest obstacle to mainstream GOP voters, Christie and Bush attack Rubio's absenteeism.
By Eli Stokols
Campaigning Tuesday in Iowa, Chris Christie didn’t want to answer Donald Trump’s scathing criticism Monday of his governing record. But he was eager to blast Marco Rubio for failing to show up and vote in the Senate.
“Dude, show up to work and vote no; and if you don’t want to, then quit,” Christie told voters during a town hall meeting in Muscatine, Iowa.
It’s the exact same line of attack against the Florida senator that Jeb Bush’s super PAC is now featuring in a new $1 million New Hampshire TV ad buy alleging that Rubio skipped a high-level intelligence briefing following the ISIL terror attacks in Paris in order to raise money for his campaign.
“Over the last three years, Rubio has missed important national security hearings and missed more total votes than any other senator. Politics first, that’s the Rubio way,” the narrator in the Right to Rise ad says.
The attacks are politically fraught for both establishment challengers: Christie has hardly shown up in Trenton to do his own job since committing to campaign almost full-time in New Hampshire; and Bush’s own attempt to prosecute this case against his former mentee in a late October debate backfired so spectacularly it prompted calls for him to drop out.
But with the starting gun of the primary fight little more than a month away, both contenders appear to be eyeing Rubio as their biggest obstacle in consolidating support from mainstream Republicans — and they’re zeroing in on what they see as the senator’s biggest weak spot just as he’s trying to close the sale.
“What you’re seeing is the clearest evidence of how wide open the center-right lane of the caucus electorate is in Iowa,” said Matt Strawn, a former Iowa GOP chairman who is uncommitted. “Those are all candidates that would love to get some momentum that will help them make their case in New Hampshire.”
“Both Bush and Christie see Rubio as the front-runner in that lane, and they’re trying to take him down so they have a better shot at it,” said Douglas Gross, who served as Mitt Romney’s 2012 Iowa finance chairman but, like a number of establishment conservatives, remains uncommitted.
The substance of the attack on Rubio not showing up to vote may matter less to establishment Republicans in Iowa, who are still trying to determine whether the young first-term senator is truly the GOP’s best general-election candidate. “I keep hearing that Rubio is people’s favorite among [choices Rubio, Bush and Christie] not because they love his voting record but because they think he’s the party’s best shot to beat Hillary Clinton,” Gross said. “So the other candidates really have to attack that electability narrative if they’re going to bring him down.”
But the absenteeism takedown has a chance of resonating in New Hampshire, where it runs parallel to recent stories about the Florida senator’s relatively light campaign schedule being a particular affront to an electorate that relishes its first-in-the-nation responsibility and demands accessibility from candidates.
“New Hampshire voters demand respect for their process and their prerogatives,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP strategist who guided John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “The theme of Rubio’s absence from the state is likely to continue to be the focus of both Jeb Bush and Chris Christie."
New Hampshire, after all, looks to be a decisive battle that will cull the establishment side of the primary down to one or two serious contenders. Christie is within striking distance of Rubio in an average of New Hampshire polls, trailing him just 11.5 percent to Rubio's 12.8 percent. Bush, meanwhile, has an average of 7.8 percent in the state, well above his national average of 4.4 percent. With no clear consensus front-runner among the four candidates seeking a ticket out of the state (Ohio Gov. John Kasich being the fourth), the race may break in the eight days between the Iowa caucuses and the primary on Feb. 9.
“The four candidates that fit in that establishment lane understand that only one, maximum two of them, are coming out of New Hampshire,” Schmidt said. “The degree to which Christie and Jeb can collapse any chance of Rubio winning New Hampshire, they exit with a comeback narrative and it pushes to the outer limits the place where Rubio has a chance to get his first victory.”
According to a recent analysis by C-SPAN, Rubio has a 64 percent voting record in 2015, the worst of the five senators who have run for president this cycle. Rubio’s campaign, which noted that his overall voting record since taking office in 2011 is “almost 90 percent,” fired back Tuesday with a lengthy statement rebutting the claims.
“Bush's team dishonestly omits that Marco is on the Senate's Intelligence Committee, where he attended the highest level briefings on the Paris attacks,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said in a statement to reporters. “No other candidate for president has received more classified Intelligence briefings or better understands the threats facing our nation today than Marco. It's sad to see Jeb's ‘joyful’ campaign reduced to such intellectual dishonesty.”
Rubio did miss the post-Paris briefing but had just a day earlier attended an Intelligence Committee meeting, according to his campaign, which pointed to a story in the Tampa Bay Times describing that meeting as "more in-depth and contain[ing] higher classified information than other briefings.”
Rubio’s rapid-response operation was also quick to blast out statements from two House Intelligence Committee members defending his attendance record and ripping the Bush super PAC ad as “dishonest.”
“I’m proud to support Marco, who understands more than any other candidate the threats facing our country, knows how we can defeat ISIS and is ready to be commander in chief,” said Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a former Air Force pilot. "It’s disappointing that Jeb Bush’s super PAC decided to discard clear facts for political gain. Jeb Bush is better than the Los Angeles-based super PAC trying to deceive voters.”
The Conservative Solutions super PAC that’s backing Rubio also responded quickly, with a new video highlighting Bush’s past statements praising Rubio and concluding in black-and-white text across the screen: “Politics changes some people.” In an accompanying fundraising pitch to supporters, the PAC’s chairman laments that the attacks in Iowa are coming from Bush, “a candidate with no chance of winning in the state, or of winning the nomination, frankly."
“Jeb’s allies have spent tens of millions while his campaign has tanked, now they’re trying to ruin another campaign and the GOP’s best chance at taking back the White House and defeating the Clinton machine,” Warren Tompkins writes in the email.
But Christie making the same argument against Rubio amplifies an attack that Bush, because of his close past relationship with his former Florida colleague, is poorly equipped to make. And unlike Bush, attacking comes naturally to Christie, who lambasted Rubio on Tuesday for missing the vote earlier this month on the end-of-year spending package he said he opposed.
"So, I can’t wait to turn on C-SPAN 2, because he gives a good speech, Marco, and I want to hear his stirring speech that’s going to try to persuade people on the floor of the Senate not to vote for this awful spending bill," Christie said during a stop at a coffee shop in Muscatine. "Except he never showed up. He was totally opposed to it and didn’t go there to vote no. Then what’s it matter that you’re opposed to it?"
Rubio, campaigning in Iowa on Tuesday afternoon alongside Rep. Trey Gowdy, who had just endorsed him, cooly shrugged off Christie’s charge, picking up on the irony that makes him, too, an imperfect messenger on this subject. “Chris is missing from New Jersey half the time,” he told reporters.
If Christie can make inroads in Iowa, he could potentially blunt Rubio’s momentum and create enough of his own to springboard into New Hampshire, where he has focused his campaign. But, according to Gross, a number of undecided establishment Iowa Republicans are more inclined to support Rubio as long as he can withstand the barrage of attacks coming his way in January.
“I think people also want to see how well he holds up under fire, how well he can perform, how tough he is,” Gross said. “That segment of the party is very pragmatic: They want to know who has the best shot at winning. So more than the substance of it, it’s how he reacts to it. If he can’t handle Bush and Christie on attendance, how’s he going to handle Hillary Clinton?”
Sensing that he’s the biggest obstacle to mainstream GOP voters, Christie and Bush attack Rubio's absenteeism.
By Eli Stokols
Campaigning Tuesday in Iowa, Chris Christie didn’t want to answer Donald Trump’s scathing criticism Monday of his governing record. But he was eager to blast Marco Rubio for failing to show up and vote in the Senate.
“Dude, show up to work and vote no; and if you don’t want to, then quit,” Christie told voters during a town hall meeting in Muscatine, Iowa.
It’s the exact same line of attack against the Florida senator that Jeb Bush’s super PAC is now featuring in a new $1 million New Hampshire TV ad buy alleging that Rubio skipped a high-level intelligence briefing following the ISIL terror attacks in Paris in order to raise money for his campaign.
“Over the last three years, Rubio has missed important national security hearings and missed more total votes than any other senator. Politics first, that’s the Rubio way,” the narrator in the Right to Rise ad says.
The attacks are politically fraught for both establishment challengers: Christie has hardly shown up in Trenton to do his own job since committing to campaign almost full-time in New Hampshire; and Bush’s own attempt to prosecute this case against his former mentee in a late October debate backfired so spectacularly it prompted calls for him to drop out.
But with the starting gun of the primary fight little more than a month away, both contenders appear to be eyeing Rubio as their biggest obstacle in consolidating support from mainstream Republicans — and they’re zeroing in on what they see as the senator’s biggest weak spot just as he’s trying to close the sale.
“What you’re seeing is the clearest evidence of how wide open the center-right lane of the caucus electorate is in Iowa,” said Matt Strawn, a former Iowa GOP chairman who is uncommitted. “Those are all candidates that would love to get some momentum that will help them make their case in New Hampshire.”
“Both Bush and Christie see Rubio as the front-runner in that lane, and they’re trying to take him down so they have a better shot at it,” said Douglas Gross, who served as Mitt Romney’s 2012 Iowa finance chairman but, like a number of establishment conservatives, remains uncommitted.
The substance of the attack on Rubio not showing up to vote may matter less to establishment Republicans in Iowa, who are still trying to determine whether the young first-term senator is truly the GOP’s best general-election candidate. “I keep hearing that Rubio is people’s favorite among [choices Rubio, Bush and Christie] not because they love his voting record but because they think he’s the party’s best shot to beat Hillary Clinton,” Gross said. “So the other candidates really have to attack that electability narrative if they’re going to bring him down.”
But the absenteeism takedown has a chance of resonating in New Hampshire, where it runs parallel to recent stories about the Florida senator’s relatively light campaign schedule being a particular affront to an electorate that relishes its first-in-the-nation responsibility and demands accessibility from candidates.
“New Hampshire voters demand respect for their process and their prerogatives,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP strategist who guided John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “The theme of Rubio’s absence from the state is likely to continue to be the focus of both Jeb Bush and Chris Christie."
New Hampshire, after all, looks to be a decisive battle that will cull the establishment side of the primary down to one or two serious contenders. Christie is within striking distance of Rubio in an average of New Hampshire polls, trailing him just 11.5 percent to Rubio's 12.8 percent. Bush, meanwhile, has an average of 7.8 percent in the state, well above his national average of 4.4 percent. With no clear consensus front-runner among the four candidates seeking a ticket out of the state (Ohio Gov. John Kasich being the fourth), the race may break in the eight days between the Iowa caucuses and the primary on Feb. 9.
“The four candidates that fit in that establishment lane understand that only one, maximum two of them, are coming out of New Hampshire,” Schmidt said. “The degree to which Christie and Jeb can collapse any chance of Rubio winning New Hampshire, they exit with a comeback narrative and it pushes to the outer limits the place where Rubio has a chance to get his first victory.”
According to a recent analysis by C-SPAN, Rubio has a 64 percent voting record in 2015, the worst of the five senators who have run for president this cycle. Rubio’s campaign, which noted that his overall voting record since taking office in 2011 is “almost 90 percent,” fired back Tuesday with a lengthy statement rebutting the claims.
“Bush's team dishonestly omits that Marco is on the Senate's Intelligence Committee, where he attended the highest level briefings on the Paris attacks,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said in a statement to reporters. “No other candidate for president has received more classified Intelligence briefings or better understands the threats facing our nation today than Marco. It's sad to see Jeb's ‘joyful’ campaign reduced to such intellectual dishonesty.”
Rubio did miss the post-Paris briefing but had just a day earlier attended an Intelligence Committee meeting, according to his campaign, which pointed to a story in the Tampa Bay Times describing that meeting as "more in-depth and contain[ing] higher classified information than other briefings.”
Rubio’s rapid-response operation was also quick to blast out statements from two House Intelligence Committee members defending his attendance record and ripping the Bush super PAC ad as “dishonest.”
“I’m proud to support Marco, who understands more than any other candidate the threats facing our country, knows how we can defeat ISIS and is ready to be commander in chief,” said Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a former Air Force pilot. "It’s disappointing that Jeb Bush’s super PAC decided to discard clear facts for political gain. Jeb Bush is better than the Los Angeles-based super PAC trying to deceive voters.”
The Conservative Solutions super PAC that’s backing Rubio also responded quickly, with a new video highlighting Bush’s past statements praising Rubio and concluding in black-and-white text across the screen: “Politics changes some people.” In an accompanying fundraising pitch to supporters, the PAC’s chairman laments that the attacks in Iowa are coming from Bush, “a candidate with no chance of winning in the state, or of winning the nomination, frankly."
“Jeb’s allies have spent tens of millions while his campaign has tanked, now they’re trying to ruin another campaign and the GOP’s best chance at taking back the White House and defeating the Clinton machine,” Warren Tompkins writes in the email.
But Christie making the same argument against Rubio amplifies an attack that Bush, because of his close past relationship with his former Florida colleague, is poorly equipped to make. And unlike Bush, attacking comes naturally to Christie, who lambasted Rubio on Tuesday for missing the vote earlier this month on the end-of-year spending package he said he opposed.
"So, I can’t wait to turn on C-SPAN 2, because he gives a good speech, Marco, and I want to hear his stirring speech that’s going to try to persuade people on the floor of the Senate not to vote for this awful spending bill," Christie said during a stop at a coffee shop in Muscatine. "Except he never showed up. He was totally opposed to it and didn’t go there to vote no. Then what’s it matter that you’re opposed to it?"
Rubio, campaigning in Iowa on Tuesday afternoon alongside Rep. Trey Gowdy, who had just endorsed him, cooly shrugged off Christie’s charge, picking up on the irony that makes him, too, an imperfect messenger on this subject. “Chris is missing from New Jersey half the time,” he told reporters.
If Christie can make inroads in Iowa, he could potentially blunt Rubio’s momentum and create enough of his own to springboard into New Hampshire, where he has focused his campaign. But, according to Gross, a number of undecided establishment Iowa Republicans are more inclined to support Rubio as long as he can withstand the barrage of attacks coming his way in January.
“I think people also want to see how well he holds up under fire, how well he can perform, how tough he is,” Gross said. “That segment of the party is very pragmatic: They want to know who has the best shot at winning. So more than the substance of it, it’s how he reacts to it. If he can’t handle Bush and Christie on attendance, how’s he going to handle Hillary Clinton?”
Pataki out
Pataki exits Republican presidential race
By POLITICO Staff
Former New York Gov. George Pataki dropped out of the presidential race Tuesday.
"While tonight I suspend my campaign for president, I am confident we can elect the right person," he tweeted, adding a statement by video.
"Tonight is the end of my journey for the White House," he said in his video.
Earlier Tuesday, a supporter confirmed Pataki's departure from the race.
“I had a nice 10-minute chat with him late afternoon and he is planning on suspending the campaign partially due to lack of resources to mount a ground game," said former New Hampshire state Sen. David Currier.
The Republican's candidacy never took off, and he's leaving the race with an average of zero percent support in national polls. Pataki, whose strategy was heavily focused on New Hampshire, raised just $153,513.89 in the third quarter, giving him $13,570.55 in cash on hand at the end of September.
He also never managed to make it to the main debate stage.
In a race that has often been dominated by political outsiders, Pataki is the fourth current or former governor to drop out, following Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal.
After ousting Mario Cuomo in 1994, Pataki served three terms as New York's governor, from 1995 to 2006. He was governor during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and, along with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was the face of the local response to the terrorist attack.
The GOP field, which has slowly winnowed, still has 12 candidates after Pataki's exit.
By POLITICO Staff
Former New York Gov. George Pataki dropped out of the presidential race Tuesday.
"While tonight I suspend my campaign for president, I am confident we can elect the right person," he tweeted, adding a statement by video.
"Tonight is the end of my journey for the White House," he said in his video.
Earlier Tuesday, a supporter confirmed Pataki's departure from the race.
“I had a nice 10-minute chat with him late afternoon and he is planning on suspending the campaign partially due to lack of resources to mount a ground game," said former New Hampshire state Sen. David Currier.
The Republican's candidacy never took off, and he's leaving the race with an average of zero percent support in national polls. Pataki, whose strategy was heavily focused on New Hampshire, raised just $153,513.89 in the third quarter, giving him $13,570.55 in cash on hand at the end of September.
He also never managed to make it to the main debate stage.
In a race that has often been dominated by political outsiders, Pataki is the fourth current or former governor to drop out, following Rick Perry, Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal.
After ousting Mario Cuomo in 1994, Pataki served three terms as New York's governor, from 1995 to 2006. He was governor during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and, along with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was the face of the local response to the terrorist attack.
The GOP field, which has slowly winnowed, still has 12 candidates after Pataki's exit.
Bigger things to worry about...
Paul: I'm confident I'll make the next main debate stage
By Nick Gass
Rand Paul expressed confidence on Wednesday that he would make the cut for the main stage of the next Republican presidential debate on Jan. 14, calling attention to recent national polling that he hoped would put him over the top.
In a Dec. 23 radio interview with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, Paul said that he would not participate in an undercard debate after POLITICO and others reported that only six candidates would likely qualify for the main stage at the Fox Business event in North Charleston, South Carolina.
A week later, Paul struck a more optimistic note on "Fox and Friends" following the release of a CNN/ORC national poll that showed him with 4 percent of the vote, but again reiterated that it sends a bad message to the public "that basically the media gets to choose who the candidates are who’ll be considered."
“The good news is, it looks like we’re actually making the criteria. There was a national poll out this week that had me in fifth place, only one point out of fourth place," he said, remarking that he is "concerned about fairness."
Candidates like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina should not be excluded, Paul continued, adding, "I don’t think it’s fair to have an artificial distinction."
The Kentucky senator barely made the last primetime debate stage, but managed to make the cut despite technically not having the right polling numbers.
Paul also asserted on Wednesday that his campaign would outperform expectations in Iowa.
"We have a good ground game there, and we think we’re going to do a lot better than the polls indicate," he said. "We have a lot of young people, college students, we have a lot of independents. A lot of people aren’t showing up in polls, so we think we’re going to outperform polls, and we’re in it to win it. We actually do believe and wouldn’t be doing this unless we thought we could win."
In commenting on The Wall Street Journal's report that the National Security Agency's spying programs scooped up communications between members of Congress and congressional leaders, Paul said he was "appalled," calling it "exactly why we need more NSA reform."
By Nick Gass
Rand Paul expressed confidence on Wednesday that he would make the cut for the main stage of the next Republican presidential debate on Jan. 14, calling attention to recent national polling that he hoped would put him over the top.
In a Dec. 23 radio interview with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, Paul said that he would not participate in an undercard debate after POLITICO and others reported that only six candidates would likely qualify for the main stage at the Fox Business event in North Charleston, South Carolina.
A week later, Paul struck a more optimistic note on "Fox and Friends" following the release of a CNN/ORC national poll that showed him with 4 percent of the vote, but again reiterated that it sends a bad message to the public "that basically the media gets to choose who the candidates are who’ll be considered."
“The good news is, it looks like we’re actually making the criteria. There was a national poll out this week that had me in fifth place, only one point out of fourth place," he said, remarking that he is "concerned about fairness."
Candidates like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, John Kasich and Carly Fiorina should not be excluded, Paul continued, adding, "I don’t think it’s fair to have an artificial distinction."
The Kentucky senator barely made the last primetime debate stage, but managed to make the cut despite technically not having the right polling numbers.
Paul also asserted on Wednesday that his campaign would outperform expectations in Iowa.
"We have a good ground game there, and we think we’re going to do a lot better than the polls indicate," he said. "We have a lot of young people, college students, we have a lot of independents. A lot of people aren’t showing up in polls, so we think we’re going to outperform polls, and we’re in it to win it. We actually do believe and wouldn’t be doing this unless we thought we could win."
In commenting on The Wall Street Journal's report that the National Security Agency's spying programs scooped up communications between members of Congress and congressional leaders, Paul said he was "appalled," calling it "exactly why we need more NSA reform."
Kock Ring
How the Kock network rivals the GOP
The billionaires and their allies have built a private political machine without precedent.
By Kenneth P. Vogel
The political machine that Charles Kock launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the official GOP in key areas.
Kock and his brother David Kock have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up ― $889 million ― is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle.
While rich donors have held considerable sway over the political process in past eras, the Kocks’ network is different. Its mission is in some ways more ambitious than the Republican Party’s ― to fundamentally reshape American public life around a libertarian-infused brand of conservatism ― but it also is encroaching on the GOP’s traditional turf. The Kock network’s data operation is now regarded by many candidates and campaigns as superior to the party’s, and it has invested in efforts to become the leading force on the right for training activists and registering voters. Its biggest group, Americans for Prosperity, plans to place full-time staff in all but eight states by late 2016 and aspires to copy the National Rifle Association’s broad-based membership plan for longevity, according to a POLITICO investigation. It found that the group has even discussed expanding its influence by writing and pushing model state budgets, a technique similar to the one used by the American Legislative Exchange Council to push various state legislative initiatives.
As the network has grown, though, internal audits at times have raised concerns about its management culture, spending and lack of coordination among core groups that compose the network. Insiders have questioned huge staff bonuses, fancy restaurant meals, purchases of Twitter followers and sporting event-related costs, as well as contracts directed to firms connected to top network operatives.
To address its growing pains, the network has tapped into a powerful resource unavailable to traditional parties, POLITICO’s investigation found ― the talent and management philosophies developed by the brothers’ giant multinational industrial conglomerate, Kock Industries.
In the post-Citizens United era of relaxed campaign finance laws, the Kocks and their megadonor allies, more than any other group of affluent political partisans, have leveraged their financial clout to do things that traditional party and political committees can’t or won’t do, as POLITICO’s investigation has shown. It revealed that the Kock network quietly launched sophisticated initiatives to recruit like-minded candidates, collect intelligence on rivals and win converts among the disadvantaged.
“I don’t know of any precedent for this,” said campaign finance scholar Robert E. Mutch, whose 2014 book “Buying the Vote; a History of Campaign Finance Reform,” traced the influence of ultrarich donors from the Gilded Age through the 2012 general election. “The rich guys who wanted to be politically active used to be politically active in the party. What’s different now is you’ve got them being active outside the party,” he said, adding that, while other megadonors are trying to build their own political operations, the Kocks have pushed this phenomenon to new heights.
Delegates and guests to the 2015 Republican National Committee summer meeting move through the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel on August 5, 2015 in Cleveland.
While the Kocks’ decision to build their own independent political organization was prompted largely by their dissatisfaction with George W. Bush and his Republican congressional majorities, so far, the network’s forays have almost exclusively complemented those of the official GOP. And the network is expected to spend heavily in 2016 on ads and other voter outreach boosting the party’s efforts to retake the White House and protect its congressional majorities. RNC and Kock network officials even meet periodically to discuss their respective efforts, to the limited extent that is legally permissible, POLITICO has learned. But the Kock network hasn’t hesitated to call out Republicans who violate the brothers’ brand of small-government fiscal conservatism. And perhaps more worrisome for the GOP, Kock operatives have signaled they’re looking for more chances to take on Republicans, including in primary campaigns.
“Our mission is to advance a free society that helps people improve their lives, not to prop up or defend the Republican Party,” said Marc Short, president of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the nonprofit overseeing the Kock network.
Nonetheless, conservative leaders have grumbled that too much of their movement is being centralized under one umbrella ― the Kocks ― while GOP officials have openly fretted about the possibility of the party losing at least some control to “a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone,” as RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh put it this year.
Permanent ground army
Charles and David Kock first dipped into their fortunes to influence American public policy in the 1970s, mostly pumping money into libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
They began getting more politically involved in response to what they saw as a reckless government expansion led by Bush and his GOP congressional majorities, including a costly Medicare expansion, the Iraq war and risky lending policies blamed for causing a housing bubble.
In 2004, not long after Charles Kock convened the Chicago donors’ meeting, the brothers provided seed funding for the group that would become the network’s most muscular political arm, Americans for Prosperity, which joined a pre-existing foundation arm that was spun off from another group the previous year. In 2004, AFP and AFP’s foundation had chapters in three states and a combined $2 million budget, according to tax filings. By last year, the main and foundation arms had morphed into the right’s most powerful nonparty group, with chapters in more than 30 states, a combined $104 million budget and a staff of 948 ― by far the network’s biggest footprint.
Internal network plans call for AFP to expand into several more states by the end of next year, sources tell POLITICO, leaving only Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington without an outpost. While the group’s stated mission is to advocate small-government policies, its evolution has been strategically tailored for maximum political impact. In recent years, the network has channeled more spending into red states where it can influence GOP governing majorities rather than fighting for swing votes. That strategy was shaped by Charles Kock’s longtime right-hand man, Rich Fink, who is considered the network’s “grand strategist” and who had privately advocated “owning” conservative states, according to network sources. Indeed, AFP has taken credit for major policy victories — including enacting tax cuts, fighting Obamacare and restricting union power ― in Republican-controlled states where it has a major presence, such as Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Likewise, it has shuttered chapters in deep blue states such as Connecticut, Oregon and Washington, where conservative reforms seem unlikely.
There’s also been a buildup in key swing states like Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia ― suggesting that the network has its eye not just on policy but also on political impact.
In Florida, for example, the Kock network’s core groups employ 77 full-time staffers, including AFP’s field staff of 50. Concerned Veterans for America, which courts veterans with fiscally conservative messaging, has 15 Florida staffers, while the LIBRE Initiative, which appeals to Latino voters, has nine. Generation Opportunity, a young voter outreach group, has three. Freedom Partners-backed outfits that aren’t considered core network groups ― the senior-focused 60 Plus Association, Concerned Women for America ― are courting other Florida voting blocs.
The network’s Sunshine State staffing rivals that of the Florida Republican Party and its local and legislative affiliates, according to sources familiar with Florida GOP politics, though the Republican Party presence in Florida and other key states will surge as the RNC ramps up its joint victory program with state party committees. RNC officials said that, by Election Day, they aim to have more than 4,500 paid staff on the ground across the country through the victory program, along with roughly 2,000 volunteer “fellows” trained through a program launched last year called the Republican Leadership Initiative. Those figures don’t include additional staff provided or subsidized by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. And the party committees, unlike Kock network groups, are able to coordinate with candidates’ campaigns to mobilize volunteers and get out the vote.
“The Kocks’ efforts are helpful to the overall conservative movement, but they can never do the core functions that the party does,” said RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer. He argued that questions about whether the RNC is ceding influence to the Kock network prove “that POLITICO fundamentally lacks a basic understanding of how the political system and parties work.” But the committee’s own post-mortem analysis of the 2012 election openly acknowledged that changes in campaign finance and the rise of outside groups have led to “a troubling diminishment of the role of political parties and even candidates themselves in our democracy.” They “no longer have the loudest voices in campaigns or even the ability to determine the issues debated in campaigns. Outside groups now play an expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow state parties in primary and general elections,” the report says. It concluded that the situation “has caused a splintered Congress with little party cohesion so that gridlock and polarization grow as the political parties lose their ability to rally their elected officeholders around a set of coherent governing policies.”
Not only is the official GOP barred from accepting the unlimited and often undisclosed checks that fuel most of the Kocks’ groups, it’s also more thinly spread. That’s because the party’s mission is to try to win every election, even if that means backing less conservative nominees. Outside players like the Kocks, on the other hand, can focus more selectively on groups, races or states that fit their agenda.
In the 2014 election run-up, AFP quietly launched an initiative to add sympathetic voters to the rolls in 14 key states, according to sources familiar with the project. That’s a function that has mostly been the GOP’s domain. But Kock operatives concluded after the 2012 election that “the left outmaneuvered the right by … expanding the universe of voters,” according to network documents obtained by POLITICO.
The network also stepped up to fill what its operatives see as a void in data analytics on the right ― its Freedom Partners-owned data shop i360 has eclipsed the RNC data operation as the choice for many GOP candidates and committees. Last year, the network also invested heavily in what its officials privately call a “leadership factory” that they see as rivaling training programs of both the Republican Party and competing conservative groups, according to sources familiar with it. The Grassroots Leadership Academy, as it is now known, was absorbed into AFP’s foundation arm in 2014 and sources say it boasted a 2014 budget of more than $2 million, which it used to provide training to all network groups.
A newly created Freedom Partners division ― headed by an operative named Nathan Nascimento — works to coordinate ground initiatives run by the different network groups in the states. This effort, like many in the network, stemmed partly from shortcomings identified in corporate-style efficiency audits, which have raised concerns about duplicative spending and poor coordination, POLITICO has learned.
Audits also flagged insufficient understanding of fiscal conservatism by AFP field staff, an issue deemed “critically important to correct,” according to sources familiar with the findings. Another assessment found an “overwhelming” percentage of the 2 million members claimed by the group were not actually involved and “do not self-identify as being volunteers.” Findings about weak volunteer engagement were taken very seriously, sources tell POLITICO, because they undermined AFP’s positioning as a grass-roots army of millions.
“They’re the most effective”
The network’s corporate-style efficiency measures are central to the donor pitches delivered by Kock operatives, who argue that they use cash more efficiently than rival conservative groups or the Republican Party.
While the super PACs devoted to various 2016 GOP presidential aspirants raised huge sums from ultrarich conservatives this year, AFP president Tim Phillips this month predicted in an interview “a lot of donors are going to give a second thought to the super PAC investments. They’re short-term strictly — no long-term value creation, A, and, B, you cannot hold them accountable as a donor. I mean, with an institution like us or some other (c)(4) that has boards and such, you can hold them accountable for how they spend your money over the long-term to actually do something.”
That framing appears to be paying off, as evidenced by the evolution of the Kocks’ twice-a-year donor gatherings. Sixteen donors joined Charles Kock at the first gathering at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel in 2003, while the most recent summit drew more than 400 ― and many of the leading GOP presidential candidates ― to a slickly produced August affair at the St. Regis in Dana Point, California. Donors give at least $100,000 each year to join Freedom Partners and attend the “seminars,” as the gatherings are known in the Kock orbit. They have in some ways replaced the party’s convention as the most coveted ticket among some major donors, and now draw a more ideologically diverse crowd than the mostly libertarian-minded donors like variety store mogul Art Pope who attended the first one ― from religious conservatives like mutual fund pioneer Foster Friess to socially moderate neocons like Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
“It’s about community and it’s also about commitment,” said Nancy Pfoutenhour, an AFP board member, Freedom Partners adviser and Kock confidante. “If you’re bringing in 40- to 50-percent more new people each time, that says there’s an appetite for what we’re doing and a shared level of concern.”
At an April 2013 gathering, POLITICO reported that Louisiana metals titan Ned Diefenthal complained to Sen. Ron Johnson about the incompetence of the RNC and its chairman, Reince Priebus. He “keeps sending me letters asking for money. I’m not giving him any money. He doesn’t know what to do with it,” Diefenthal said of Priebus. While Diefenthal’s family had donated $280,000 to the RNC over the years, he suggested to Johnson that the Kock network is a better investment.
Minnesota media mogul Stan Hubbard, a billionaire megadonor who regularly attends the Kocks’ gatherings, this month told POLITICO, “it isn’t just the Kocks’ money. Remember, most of the money comes from others.” Hubbard, his family and their company have donated nearly $5 million over the years to Republican and conservative candidates and groups that disclose their donors, but he told POLITICO that the Kock groups, which mostly are not required to disclose their donors, have been a leading recipient of his family’s cash.
“They’re one of the very biggest, if not the biggest, because I think they’re the most effective,” said Hubbard. “Being effective means they put resources in, they do research and they learn. They’ve learned every time they do something. If it doesn’t work the way they like, they do it differently. Like any business, they learn from experience. Any political party should learn.”
Some insiders argue that the efficiency, effectiveness and robustness are aspirational but sometimes don’t match the reality on the ground.
“It’s smoke and mirrors, and AstroTurf,” said one former network official, who did not want to be identified revealing internal network conversations. “It’s something that is being sold to donors. The notion that it is a grass-roots army is ludicrous. And the rest of it ― whether it’s the 1,200 operatives or the door-knockers or Twitter followers ― it’s all bought and paid for.”
Levi Russell, a spokesman for AFP, said suggestions that the group is a paper tiger “lack all credibility. One visit to one of the many AFP field offices around the country will show a vibrant, engaged and passionate force of grass-roots volunteers who power our field program.”
While the network boasts of cost controls, its groups’ fundraising success also means that they are among the biggest spenders on the right. They have paid out annual bonuses that can exceed a full year’s salary. Short, the head of Freedom Partners, earned a 2014 base salary of $235,000 but pulled in $525,000 in bonuses, tax filings show, putting him well ahead of Priebus, who made $153,000 last year, but far behind U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue, who was paid $4.9 million in 2011. And the network has financed contracts to consultants favored by donors (last year, Freedom Partners paid pollster Frank Luntz $1.5 million) or with connections to its operatives.
Americans for Prosperity’s chief technology officer, Adam Stryker, left in September after some AFP operatives questioned his spending of group funds and contracts signed with his friends’ firms, multiple sources familiar with Stryker’s tenure at the group told POLITICO. They said Stryker, a Las Vegas native, ran up expenses on donor meals at tony restaurants and accompanied vendors to exclusive events like the Kentucky Derby and the Stanley Cup Finals. One operative who worked with AFP told POLITICO that a number of AFP officials spent heavily. “There were checks and balances, but they weren’t effective,” the operative said.
In an email, Stryker ― who like many departed network employees signed a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from discussing his former employer ― said his departure was not related to questions about spending, but otherwise refused to comment. An internal AFP staff email said he was leaving “to pursue new opportunities in the private sector” but would remain as a consultant through March 2016.
AFP declined to comment, saying it does not discuss personnel matters. AFP and network officials both pointed to rigorous accounting practices for evaluating, approving and tracking contracts and other expenses that they say flag problem spending in real time and keep their rates among the lowest in politics.
Many spending and contracting controls were introduced after the 2012 election, during which the Kock network spent more than $400 million but failed to oust President Barack Obama or the Democratic Senate majority. Afterward, attention inside the network turned to an operative named Sean Noble, who oversaw a strategy that outsourced many key functions to consulting firms, including his own. Three firms owned by Noble were paid $24 million by a Kock-backed nonprofit.
Market Based Management
A forensic internal analysis after the election found the network was ill-served by redundancies and infighting among Kock-backed efforts, an inability to measure impact and too much spending by consultants ― including Noble ― who were technically independent from the Kock operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the analysis.
To avoid a repeat, the network centralized and rejiggered its organizational flow chart to bring more functions under the umbrella of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. At one point, Noble was offered a job working for the group that became Freedom Partners but turned it down, sources told POLITICO. Freedom Partners sought to reduce the network’s reliance on Noble and other outside consultants by building its own message testing, polling and advertising operations, partly by acquiring a Kock-backed nonprofit called Public Notice.
Freedom Partners became the vehicle for disseminating cash and coordinating strategy among the network’s allied groups. It has given out $384 million in grants to dozens of groups between its creation in late 2011 through the end of last year, the most recent period covered by publicly available tax returns. And it unceremoniously terminated underperforming initiatives, including the voter registration project, which was judged too costly for what it was delivering. Another was a well-financed initiative called Race Fans 4 Freedom, which in the run-up to the 2012 election endeavored to win converts to the network’s free market causes among people attending auto races in key states including Ohio and Virginia. It was found not to justify the cost of sponsoring the races.
Another move involved consolidating the network’s far-flung Washington-area headquarters offices at considerable cost into a cluster of glass office towers in the Courthouse neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in Washington’s near suburbs. At the center is an office building that houses Freedom Partners, the Charles Kock Institute and the Charles Kock Foundation. A block away sits Americans for Prosperity's sleek new offices, which are near the AFP Foundation and the Kock-backed data firm i360. Although the relocation was intended to facilitate greater collaboration, the network now occupies so many scattered offices in similar-looking buildings that the map can prove difficult to navigate even for insiders.
In fact, sources within the network tell POLITICO there is internal talk about purchasing an entire office building, though some of the sources say that’s unlikely, partly because Charles Kock views buildings as vanity projects.
While David Kock has welcomed attention for his cultural, medical and political philanthropy — even accepting a role as an alternate delegate to the 2012 GOP convention — Charles Kock rarely appears at fundraisers beyond those for the network. In fact, he has complained about the vagaries of politics — from pandering politicians to big consulting contracts to internecine competition — and has worked to rid his political network of what he sees as inefficiencies endemic to politics, partly by infusing it with talent, techniques and resources from Kock Industries.
Kock Industries’ corporate counsel, Mark Holden, who was already on the Freedom Partners board, joined AFP’s board and chairs its powerful executive committee. Rich Fink, who has served in various executive positions at Kock Industries, sat on the boards of the Charles Kock Institute, Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity Foundation, though he left AFP’s foundation board last month. And numerous high-ranking officials have cycled through the network, including roles at its administrative division, the Center for Shared Services, which handles human resources and IT services for all network groups. This entity was patterned off Kock Business Solutions, which fills the same function for Kock Industries. The Center, which originally was a stand-alone nonprofit, was rolled into Freedom Partners this past summer and trains network employees in Market-Based Management ― the organizational philosophy Charles Kock has honed over the years at Kock Industries.
Insiders say it’s impossible to overestimate the impact of 80-year-old Charles Kock or to gauge how his death would affect the network’s political efforts, especially fundraising.
“There’s definitely some concern about what happens after Charles dies,” said one operative who works with the network. “Many of the donors are there because they see Charles as the lead investor, and it’s not clear whether people are going to be as enthused about giving if they don’t see him at the helm.”
While Charles Kock is said to be in good health (his brother David is 75 and has battled prostrate cancer), he has increasingly brought his son Chase Kock into the family’s political and corporate efforts. But there’s no indication that donors would rally to the son in the same way.
“What you have in the Kock organization is what you have in nondemocratic societies ― a succession problem,” said Mutch, the campaign finance historian. He views the Kocks as a case study of how much influence can be amassed by super-rich partisans in the new big-money era — and how long they can hold onto their power.
“This may be a short term consequence of Citizens United, and, if it doesn’t work out really well, maybe the billionaires themselves will say ‘OK, we’ll just let the party handle this.’ I just don’t know. I mean, nobody knows.”
The billionaires and their allies have built a private political machine without precedent.
By Kenneth P. Vogel
The political machine that Charles Kock launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the official GOP in key areas.
Kock and his brother David Kock have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up ― $889 million ― is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle.
While rich donors have held considerable sway over the political process in past eras, the Kocks’ network is different. Its mission is in some ways more ambitious than the Republican Party’s ― to fundamentally reshape American public life around a libertarian-infused brand of conservatism ― but it also is encroaching on the GOP’s traditional turf. The Kock network’s data operation is now regarded by many candidates and campaigns as superior to the party’s, and it has invested in efforts to become the leading force on the right for training activists and registering voters. Its biggest group, Americans for Prosperity, plans to place full-time staff in all but eight states by late 2016 and aspires to copy the National Rifle Association’s broad-based membership plan for longevity, according to a POLITICO investigation. It found that the group has even discussed expanding its influence by writing and pushing model state budgets, a technique similar to the one used by the American Legislative Exchange Council to push various state legislative initiatives.
As the network has grown, though, internal audits at times have raised concerns about its management culture, spending and lack of coordination among core groups that compose the network. Insiders have questioned huge staff bonuses, fancy restaurant meals, purchases of Twitter followers and sporting event-related costs, as well as contracts directed to firms connected to top network operatives.
To address its growing pains, the network has tapped into a powerful resource unavailable to traditional parties, POLITICO’s investigation found ― the talent and management philosophies developed by the brothers’ giant multinational industrial conglomerate, Kock Industries.
In the post-Citizens United era of relaxed campaign finance laws, the Kocks and their megadonor allies, more than any other group of affluent political partisans, have leveraged their financial clout to do things that traditional party and political committees can’t or won’t do, as POLITICO’s investigation has shown. It revealed that the Kock network quietly launched sophisticated initiatives to recruit like-minded candidates, collect intelligence on rivals and win converts among the disadvantaged.
“I don’t know of any precedent for this,” said campaign finance scholar Robert E. Mutch, whose 2014 book “Buying the Vote; a History of Campaign Finance Reform,” traced the influence of ultrarich donors from the Gilded Age through the 2012 general election. “The rich guys who wanted to be politically active used to be politically active in the party. What’s different now is you’ve got them being active outside the party,” he said, adding that, while other megadonors are trying to build their own political operations, the Kocks have pushed this phenomenon to new heights.
Delegates and guests to the 2015 Republican National Committee summer meeting move through the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel on August 5, 2015 in Cleveland.
While the Kocks’ decision to build their own independent political organization was prompted largely by their dissatisfaction with George W. Bush and his Republican congressional majorities, so far, the network’s forays have almost exclusively complemented those of the official GOP. And the network is expected to spend heavily in 2016 on ads and other voter outreach boosting the party’s efforts to retake the White House and protect its congressional majorities. RNC and Kock network officials even meet periodically to discuss their respective efforts, to the limited extent that is legally permissible, POLITICO has learned. But the Kock network hasn’t hesitated to call out Republicans who violate the brothers’ brand of small-government fiscal conservatism. And perhaps more worrisome for the GOP, Kock operatives have signaled they’re looking for more chances to take on Republicans, including in primary campaigns.
“Our mission is to advance a free society that helps people improve their lives, not to prop up or defend the Republican Party,” said Marc Short, president of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the nonprofit overseeing the Kock network.
Nonetheless, conservative leaders have grumbled that too much of their movement is being centralized under one umbrella ― the Kocks ― while GOP officials have openly fretted about the possibility of the party losing at least some control to “a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone,” as RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh put it this year.
Permanent ground army
Charles and David Kock first dipped into their fortunes to influence American public policy in the 1970s, mostly pumping money into libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
They began getting more politically involved in response to what they saw as a reckless government expansion led by Bush and his GOP congressional majorities, including a costly Medicare expansion, the Iraq war and risky lending policies blamed for causing a housing bubble.
In 2004, not long after Charles Kock convened the Chicago donors’ meeting, the brothers provided seed funding for the group that would become the network’s most muscular political arm, Americans for Prosperity, which joined a pre-existing foundation arm that was spun off from another group the previous year. In 2004, AFP and AFP’s foundation had chapters in three states and a combined $2 million budget, according to tax filings. By last year, the main and foundation arms had morphed into the right’s most powerful nonparty group, with chapters in more than 30 states, a combined $104 million budget and a staff of 948 ― by far the network’s biggest footprint.
Internal network plans call for AFP to expand into several more states by the end of next year, sources tell POLITICO, leaving only Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington without an outpost. While the group’s stated mission is to advocate small-government policies, its evolution has been strategically tailored for maximum political impact. In recent years, the network has channeled more spending into red states where it can influence GOP governing majorities rather than fighting for swing votes. That strategy was shaped by Charles Kock’s longtime right-hand man, Rich Fink, who is considered the network’s “grand strategist” and who had privately advocated “owning” conservative states, according to network sources. Indeed, AFP has taken credit for major policy victories — including enacting tax cuts, fighting Obamacare and restricting union power ― in Republican-controlled states where it has a major presence, such as Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Likewise, it has shuttered chapters in deep blue states such as Connecticut, Oregon and Washington, where conservative reforms seem unlikely.
There’s also been a buildup in key swing states like Colorado, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia ― suggesting that the network has its eye not just on policy but also on political impact.
In Florida, for example, the Kock network’s core groups employ 77 full-time staffers, including AFP’s field staff of 50. Concerned Veterans for America, which courts veterans with fiscally conservative messaging, has 15 Florida staffers, while the LIBRE Initiative, which appeals to Latino voters, has nine. Generation Opportunity, a young voter outreach group, has three. Freedom Partners-backed outfits that aren’t considered core network groups ― the senior-focused 60 Plus Association, Concerned Women for America ― are courting other Florida voting blocs.
The network’s Sunshine State staffing rivals that of the Florida Republican Party and its local and legislative affiliates, according to sources familiar with Florida GOP politics, though the Republican Party presence in Florida and other key states will surge as the RNC ramps up its joint victory program with state party committees. RNC officials said that, by Election Day, they aim to have more than 4,500 paid staff on the ground across the country through the victory program, along with roughly 2,000 volunteer “fellows” trained through a program launched last year called the Republican Leadership Initiative. Those figures don’t include additional staff provided or subsidized by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. And the party committees, unlike Kock network groups, are able to coordinate with candidates’ campaigns to mobilize volunteers and get out the vote.
“The Kocks’ efforts are helpful to the overall conservative movement, but they can never do the core functions that the party does,” said RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer. He argued that questions about whether the RNC is ceding influence to the Kock network prove “that POLITICO fundamentally lacks a basic understanding of how the political system and parties work.” But the committee’s own post-mortem analysis of the 2012 election openly acknowledged that changes in campaign finance and the rise of outside groups have led to “a troubling diminishment of the role of political parties and even candidates themselves in our democracy.” They “no longer have the loudest voices in campaigns or even the ability to determine the issues debated in campaigns. Outside groups now play an expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow state parties in primary and general elections,” the report says. It concluded that the situation “has caused a splintered Congress with little party cohesion so that gridlock and polarization grow as the political parties lose their ability to rally their elected officeholders around a set of coherent governing policies.”
Not only is the official GOP barred from accepting the unlimited and often undisclosed checks that fuel most of the Kocks’ groups, it’s also more thinly spread. That’s because the party’s mission is to try to win every election, even if that means backing less conservative nominees. Outside players like the Kocks, on the other hand, can focus more selectively on groups, races or states that fit their agenda.
In the 2014 election run-up, AFP quietly launched an initiative to add sympathetic voters to the rolls in 14 key states, according to sources familiar with the project. That’s a function that has mostly been the GOP’s domain. But Kock operatives concluded after the 2012 election that “the left outmaneuvered the right by … expanding the universe of voters,” according to network documents obtained by POLITICO.
The network also stepped up to fill what its operatives see as a void in data analytics on the right ― its Freedom Partners-owned data shop i360 has eclipsed the RNC data operation as the choice for many GOP candidates and committees. Last year, the network also invested heavily in what its officials privately call a “leadership factory” that they see as rivaling training programs of both the Republican Party and competing conservative groups, according to sources familiar with it. The Grassroots Leadership Academy, as it is now known, was absorbed into AFP’s foundation arm in 2014 and sources say it boasted a 2014 budget of more than $2 million, which it used to provide training to all network groups.
A newly created Freedom Partners division ― headed by an operative named Nathan Nascimento — works to coordinate ground initiatives run by the different network groups in the states. This effort, like many in the network, stemmed partly from shortcomings identified in corporate-style efficiency audits, which have raised concerns about duplicative spending and poor coordination, POLITICO has learned.
Audits also flagged insufficient understanding of fiscal conservatism by AFP field staff, an issue deemed “critically important to correct,” according to sources familiar with the findings. Another assessment found an “overwhelming” percentage of the 2 million members claimed by the group were not actually involved and “do not self-identify as being volunteers.” Findings about weak volunteer engagement were taken very seriously, sources tell POLITICO, because they undermined AFP’s positioning as a grass-roots army of millions.
“They’re the most effective”
The network’s corporate-style efficiency measures are central to the donor pitches delivered by Kock operatives, who argue that they use cash more efficiently than rival conservative groups or the Republican Party.
While the super PACs devoted to various 2016 GOP presidential aspirants raised huge sums from ultrarich conservatives this year, AFP president Tim Phillips this month predicted in an interview “a lot of donors are going to give a second thought to the super PAC investments. They’re short-term strictly — no long-term value creation, A, and, B, you cannot hold them accountable as a donor. I mean, with an institution like us or some other (c)(4) that has boards and such, you can hold them accountable for how they spend your money over the long-term to actually do something.”
That framing appears to be paying off, as evidenced by the evolution of the Kocks’ twice-a-year donor gatherings. Sixteen donors joined Charles Kock at the first gathering at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel in 2003, while the most recent summit drew more than 400 ― and many of the leading GOP presidential candidates ― to a slickly produced August affair at the St. Regis in Dana Point, California. Donors give at least $100,000 each year to join Freedom Partners and attend the “seminars,” as the gatherings are known in the Kock orbit. They have in some ways replaced the party’s convention as the most coveted ticket among some major donors, and now draw a more ideologically diverse crowd than the mostly libertarian-minded donors like variety store mogul Art Pope who attended the first one ― from religious conservatives like mutual fund pioneer Foster Friess to socially moderate neocons like Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
“It’s about community and it’s also about commitment,” said Nancy Pfoutenhour, an AFP board member, Freedom Partners adviser and Kock confidante. “If you’re bringing in 40- to 50-percent more new people each time, that says there’s an appetite for what we’re doing and a shared level of concern.”
At an April 2013 gathering, POLITICO reported that Louisiana metals titan Ned Diefenthal complained to Sen. Ron Johnson about the incompetence of the RNC and its chairman, Reince Priebus. He “keeps sending me letters asking for money. I’m not giving him any money. He doesn’t know what to do with it,” Diefenthal said of Priebus. While Diefenthal’s family had donated $280,000 to the RNC over the years, he suggested to Johnson that the Kock network is a better investment.
Minnesota media mogul Stan Hubbard, a billionaire megadonor who regularly attends the Kocks’ gatherings, this month told POLITICO, “it isn’t just the Kocks’ money. Remember, most of the money comes from others.” Hubbard, his family and their company have donated nearly $5 million over the years to Republican and conservative candidates and groups that disclose their donors, but he told POLITICO that the Kock groups, which mostly are not required to disclose their donors, have been a leading recipient of his family’s cash.
“They’re one of the very biggest, if not the biggest, because I think they’re the most effective,” said Hubbard. “Being effective means they put resources in, they do research and they learn. They’ve learned every time they do something. If it doesn’t work the way they like, they do it differently. Like any business, they learn from experience. Any political party should learn.”
Some insiders argue that the efficiency, effectiveness and robustness are aspirational but sometimes don’t match the reality on the ground.
“It’s smoke and mirrors, and AstroTurf,” said one former network official, who did not want to be identified revealing internal network conversations. “It’s something that is being sold to donors. The notion that it is a grass-roots army is ludicrous. And the rest of it ― whether it’s the 1,200 operatives or the door-knockers or Twitter followers ― it’s all bought and paid for.”
Levi Russell, a spokesman for AFP, said suggestions that the group is a paper tiger “lack all credibility. One visit to one of the many AFP field offices around the country will show a vibrant, engaged and passionate force of grass-roots volunteers who power our field program.”
While the network boasts of cost controls, its groups’ fundraising success also means that they are among the biggest spenders on the right. They have paid out annual bonuses that can exceed a full year’s salary. Short, the head of Freedom Partners, earned a 2014 base salary of $235,000 but pulled in $525,000 in bonuses, tax filings show, putting him well ahead of Priebus, who made $153,000 last year, but far behind U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue, who was paid $4.9 million in 2011. And the network has financed contracts to consultants favored by donors (last year, Freedom Partners paid pollster Frank Luntz $1.5 million) or with connections to its operatives.
Americans for Prosperity’s chief technology officer, Adam Stryker, left in September after some AFP operatives questioned his spending of group funds and contracts signed with his friends’ firms, multiple sources familiar with Stryker’s tenure at the group told POLITICO. They said Stryker, a Las Vegas native, ran up expenses on donor meals at tony restaurants and accompanied vendors to exclusive events like the Kentucky Derby and the Stanley Cup Finals. One operative who worked with AFP told POLITICO that a number of AFP officials spent heavily. “There were checks and balances, but they weren’t effective,” the operative said.
In an email, Stryker ― who like many departed network employees signed a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from discussing his former employer ― said his departure was not related to questions about spending, but otherwise refused to comment. An internal AFP staff email said he was leaving “to pursue new opportunities in the private sector” but would remain as a consultant through March 2016.
AFP declined to comment, saying it does not discuss personnel matters. AFP and network officials both pointed to rigorous accounting practices for evaluating, approving and tracking contracts and other expenses that they say flag problem spending in real time and keep their rates among the lowest in politics.
Many spending and contracting controls were introduced after the 2012 election, during which the Kock network spent more than $400 million but failed to oust President Barack Obama or the Democratic Senate majority. Afterward, attention inside the network turned to an operative named Sean Noble, who oversaw a strategy that outsourced many key functions to consulting firms, including his own. Three firms owned by Noble were paid $24 million by a Kock-backed nonprofit.
Market Based Management
A forensic internal analysis after the election found the network was ill-served by redundancies and infighting among Kock-backed efforts, an inability to measure impact and too much spending by consultants ― including Noble ― who were technically independent from the Kock operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the analysis.
To avoid a repeat, the network centralized and rejiggered its organizational flow chart to bring more functions under the umbrella of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. At one point, Noble was offered a job working for the group that became Freedom Partners but turned it down, sources told POLITICO. Freedom Partners sought to reduce the network’s reliance on Noble and other outside consultants by building its own message testing, polling and advertising operations, partly by acquiring a Kock-backed nonprofit called Public Notice.
Freedom Partners became the vehicle for disseminating cash and coordinating strategy among the network’s allied groups. It has given out $384 million in grants to dozens of groups between its creation in late 2011 through the end of last year, the most recent period covered by publicly available tax returns. And it unceremoniously terminated underperforming initiatives, including the voter registration project, which was judged too costly for what it was delivering. Another was a well-financed initiative called Race Fans 4 Freedom, which in the run-up to the 2012 election endeavored to win converts to the network’s free market causes among people attending auto races in key states including Ohio and Virginia. It was found not to justify the cost of sponsoring the races.
Another move involved consolidating the network’s far-flung Washington-area headquarters offices at considerable cost into a cluster of glass office towers in the Courthouse neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, in Washington’s near suburbs. At the center is an office building that houses Freedom Partners, the Charles Kock Institute and the Charles Kock Foundation. A block away sits Americans for Prosperity's sleek new offices, which are near the AFP Foundation and the Kock-backed data firm i360. Although the relocation was intended to facilitate greater collaboration, the network now occupies so many scattered offices in similar-looking buildings that the map can prove difficult to navigate even for insiders.
In fact, sources within the network tell POLITICO there is internal talk about purchasing an entire office building, though some of the sources say that’s unlikely, partly because Charles Kock views buildings as vanity projects.
While David Kock has welcomed attention for his cultural, medical and political philanthropy — even accepting a role as an alternate delegate to the 2012 GOP convention — Charles Kock rarely appears at fundraisers beyond those for the network. In fact, he has complained about the vagaries of politics — from pandering politicians to big consulting contracts to internecine competition — and has worked to rid his political network of what he sees as inefficiencies endemic to politics, partly by infusing it with talent, techniques and resources from Kock Industries.
Kock Industries’ corporate counsel, Mark Holden, who was already on the Freedom Partners board, joined AFP’s board and chairs its powerful executive committee. Rich Fink, who has served in various executive positions at Kock Industries, sat on the boards of the Charles Kock Institute, Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity Foundation, though he left AFP’s foundation board last month. And numerous high-ranking officials have cycled through the network, including roles at its administrative division, the Center for Shared Services, which handles human resources and IT services for all network groups. This entity was patterned off Kock Business Solutions, which fills the same function for Kock Industries. The Center, which originally was a stand-alone nonprofit, was rolled into Freedom Partners this past summer and trains network employees in Market-Based Management ― the organizational philosophy Charles Kock has honed over the years at Kock Industries.
Insiders say it’s impossible to overestimate the impact of 80-year-old Charles Kock or to gauge how his death would affect the network’s political efforts, especially fundraising.
“There’s definitely some concern about what happens after Charles dies,” said one operative who works with the network. “Many of the donors are there because they see Charles as the lead investor, and it’s not clear whether people are going to be as enthused about giving if they don’t see him at the helm.”
While Charles Kock is said to be in good health (his brother David is 75 and has battled prostrate cancer), he has increasingly brought his son Chase Kock into the family’s political and corporate efforts. But there’s no indication that donors would rally to the son in the same way.
“What you have in the Kock organization is what you have in nondemocratic societies ― a succession problem,” said Mutch, the campaign finance historian. He views the Kocks as a case study of how much influence can be amassed by super-rich partisans in the new big-money era — and how long they can hold onto their power.
“This may be a short term consequence of Citizens United, and, if it doesn’t work out really well, maybe the billionaires themselves will say ‘OK, we’ll just let the party handle this.’ I just don’t know. I mean, nobody knows.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)