Frustrated that climate change wasn’t more of an issue in the 2012 campaign, Tom Steyer quit his job at Farallon Capital, a hedge-fund firm that had made him a billionaire, and dedicated himself to making a difference. He plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on candidates and ballot initiatives.
“The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” Steyer said of candidates he judges to be on the wrong side of the climate change debate.
He has already invested $126,000 in the Massachusetts Democratic primary to fill John Kerry’s senate seat. In that race, he favors Rep. Ed Markey over Rep. Stephen Lynch because the latter supports the Keystone XL pipeline project.
Mr. Steyer has hired Al Gore’s 2000 campaign press secretary, Chris Lehane, to be his spokesman.
Lehane also noted that climate change deniers — those lawmakers who have expressed skepticism on the science that proves climate change exists and is man-made — could come under particular fire.
“One of the places you’ll see a significant focus is on candidates that are anti-science, the ones who explicitly put their heads in the sand and said they don’t believe in the science,” he said.
This is our new political landscape. On one side, we have billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess and the Koch Brothers. On the other side, we have billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. It’s wrong. I don’t care if I happen to agree with Steyer and Bloomberg on a lot of issues. They shouldn’t have more of a voice than I do on who wins elections. Even if we welcome some billionaire firepower on our side to balance out what we’re facing from the right, the real reform will come when power is restored to the people.
I don’t really blame Steyer and Bloomberg for throwing their weight around. But I’d be a lot happier if they worked just as hard to fight for meaningful campaign finance reform as they do to protect the environment or control gun violence. When they talk about destroying their political enemies, they legitimize a political system that has become little more than a boxing match between a few of our richest citizens.
Fortunately, we’ve learned that money is no substitute for political organizing. Friess and Adelson were able to keep Santorum and Gingrich in the race for the Republican nomination, but those candidates still lost. Yet, those two billionaires completely distorted the GOP primaries, possibly changing the outcome of the presidential election by prolonging the contest and weakening Mitt Romney. They also invited the backlash we’re seeing now from left-leaning billionaires.
If we’re consistent, we have to cry foul when billionaires declare that they are going to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to “destroy” their political opponents, even if we have the same political opponents.
