Judging from the media hype surrounding Charles Koch’s interview, this past Sunday, with Jonathan Karl on ABC, you would think that the Koch brothers have undergone some kind of miraculous political conversion. ABC blasted out several breathless news alerts after the interview, saying that it was “possible” that Koch might prefer Hillary Clinton to the Republican Presidential candidates, and that he is so disenchanted with the Party’s options that he won’t even go to its Convention. These bulletins have been swallowed and then regurgitated by one media outlet after the next, which in turn have spawned a wave of punditry, mostly concluding that Koch’s alleged transformation is the latest proof of the G.O.P. establishment’s dire dislike of Donald Trump.
It makes a good story, but it’s almost completely hot air.
To begin with, Charles Koch has never defined himself as a Republican Party stalwart. He has long stood far to the right of the Republican Party, which he has disparaged for spending too much, taxing too much, and regulating too much. He has been denigrating Republican candidates at least since 1980, when he talked his younger brother David into running as the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket, against Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George H. W. Bush. The Kochs considered Reagan, the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, to be a big-government sellout. So the fact that they don’t like their options this year is anything but new. And, for the record, Charles Koch has rarely, if ever, engaged in Presidential primary fights, and he has never attended a Republican convention. So the idea that it is an ominous sign for him to abstain from picking a primary candidate, and forgo attendance at the Convention, is a joke.
Charles Koch’s more conventional brother David did attend the G.O.P. Convention in 2012, as an alternate delegate. David Koch has also engaged in more mainstream Republican politics, serving as a vice-chair of Bob Dole’s campaign against Bill Clinton, in 1996. But Charles Koch, who has been the driving force behind the brothers’ ideological spending, has long had a more audacious goal: to fund a libertarian revolution in America, in which taxes and regulations on companies such as Koch Industries would be all but obliterated. As Brian Doherty, the author of “Radicals for Capitalism,” a history of the libertarian movement, has written, Charles Koch doesn’t merely want to elect politicians; he wants to “supply the themes and words for the scripts,” in order to alter the entire direction of the country.
So far, the Republican Party has proven to be a far more hospitable vehicle for Charles Koch’s ambitions than the Democratic Party. But if the Democrats were willing to serve the Kochs’ anti-government agenda, it’s not news that the brothers would be just as content to back them. But saying that is saying almost nothing, because obviously Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are not going to convert to extreme libertarianism.
This gets to the final bit of hype about the ABC interview. Karl asked Charles Koch whether it was possible that he would back Clinton, rather than one of the Republicans. After a bit of uncomfortable hemming and hawing, Koch said that it was, but added, “We would have to believe her actions would be quite different than her rhetoric. Let me put it that way.”
So, in essence, Charles Koch said that it was “possible” that he would support Hillary Clinton, as long as she wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Moreover, this pronouncement was made during a period in which the Kochs have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to refurbish their image. As I reported earlier this year, they are following advice from public-relations advisers who suggested that they need to appear more bipartisan, and more willing to form alliances with unlikely partners.
Amid all this talk of possibly supporting Democrats, Koch has made no promise to refrain from spending the astounding eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars or so that he and his group of political donors have said they would pool in a war chest for the 2016 political cycle. Whether some of that cash will be spent against Clinton remains to be seen, but at the very least, according to an adviser to the Kochs, they are very interested in spending whatever it takes to keep the Senate and the House in Republican hands, and to promote anti-government conservative candidates and policies all over the country. So, at the end of the day, Charles Koch is saying and doing the same things he has for thirty-five years.
In these days of Trump-mania, that evidently passes for big news.
