They are rich. They are unattached. They are looking for a little excitement. Meet the Draft Christie committee, a small but influential group of Republican-leaning donors and activists, many based in New York, united by a shared desire to see Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey run for president. There is Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire Home Depot founder who is perhaps Mr. Christie’s most fervent booster; Paul E. Singer, the publicity-shy hedge fund magnate and Republican activist who is among the most-sought-after Republican donors in the country; and David H. Koch, the industrialist, Tea Party benefactor and, according to Forbes, the richest man in New York. Charles R. Schwab, the personal investment guru, is also among those who have shown interest in seeing a Christie presidential bid, according to published reports and people familiar with the discussions, as is the financier Stanley F. Druckenmiller. So are the hedge fund managers David Tepper and Daniel S. Loeb, a onetime supporter of President Obama. In recent months, Christie enthusiasts have lighted up the phone lines between Manhattan and Trenton trying to persuade the governor to enter the Republican field amid growing concern about the current contenders.
Now, when financiers are willing to put their money where their ideology is, somehow that does not equal when unions do the same; unions are called special interest, are charged with holding the Democratic party hostage to their ideology, and bad for capitalism. When billionaires do it, what is it called?
Whatever they call it, these men simply do not like Mitt Romney. Why that is, I do not particularly care, but I do wonder.
Buzz about Mr. Christie’s presidential prospects intensified in recent days after a previously unknown group, the Committee for Our Children’s Future, unveiled a $1.5 million television advertising campaign in New Jersey promoting Mr. Christie’s accomplishments. “Runaway spending. Record debt. Gridlocked government. Washington is backwards,” the script reads. “But Chris Christie, with bipartisan support, is taking New Jersey in another direction.” The group was formed by Christie friends dating back to his undergraduate days at the University of Delaware. A Republican affiliated with the group, who agreed to speak in detail about its origins in return for anonymity, said it was formed as a way to defend against labor union attacks in New Jersey.
They do it anonymously, hiding behind their millions and pseudo-patriotic names, for they know that if the rabble knew that it is billionaires who owns industries in the Midwest but live in New York who finance the teabags, they might not like it quite so much as they do when it is a committee for our children's future that does it.
“I was at a conference this week with a lot of high-powered people,” said Bradford M. Freeman, who led California fund-raising for George W. Bush. “People just said he was fantastic. Those that know him or have heard him speak are very enthusiastic. He’s articulate, he’s done a good job in New Jersey, he has good charisma.”
High-powered people are not a special interest, of course. And what they like about his record is that he is anti-union.
Many have ties to the Manhattan Institute, an incubator of the brand of urban conservatism — heavy on criticism of public employee unions and runaway state budgets — to which Mr. Christie is the country’s most visible Republican heir.
They hate unions. That is a common theme. Unions are evil. Plutocrats are patriotic. But, perhaps there is another side of the issue to consider as accurate.
'Fiscal conservative’ masks anti-tax agenda, writes Darrell Delamaide.
David and Charles Koch, owners of the privately held energy firm Koch Enterprises, have long since been revealed as the main funders of the “grassroots” Tea Party movement, which cloaks an anti-tax agenda in a small-government Libertarian camouflage. Mitt Romney’s biggest liability as a candidate, aside from the fact that he may be too bland and too fake to defeat Barack Obama, is that he’s not sufficiently on board with this anti-tax agenda.
Perhaps Romney knows that the anti-tax agenda is a recipe for disaster; Ronald Reagan found it. But these plutocrats and their lackeys want to ignore historical truths.
Pundits have tried to figure out how people who say they want to reduce deficits can claim, against all notions of financial physics, that they can do so by lowering taxes. That’s because they aren’t really interested in reducing the deficit. They are just interested in lowering taxes.
They want someone who will do their bidding, get government out of their way, and maybe even turn the clock back a century.
The Koch brothers could have written the speech Christie gave Tuesday night at the Reagan library in California. Interspersed with barbs about President Barack Obama’s lack of leadership, Christie recited the familiar litany of the anti-taxers — unleash our entrepreneurial energies, favor accomplishment instead of entitlement, remove the “uncertainties” of the tax code, and so on and so on. Beneath all the apple-pie-and-motherhood talk of American exceptionalism and the greatness of Ronald Reagan, the key line of Christie’s speech was the attack on Obama for suggesting that a return to the modest Clinton-era tax rates would be a fair burden-sharing in restoring fiscal balance.
Bush and Cheney sent soldiers to war without adequate equipment, to accomplish abstract ideological goals and feed billions of dollars to the military-industrial complex, created an economic imbalance that nearly sent the nation into an economic depression, the standard of living of the middle class has stagnated for a decade, more than 40 million people are below the poverty line (itself a laughably inadequate sum), and what these people want is yet more money for themselves.
It would be hard to imagine a better way to mobilize the Democratic base than to nominate Christie and pair him with, say, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as a vice presidential candidate to create the Tea Party dream ticket. Money counts for a lot in our battered democracy, but not yet everything.
Perhaps.
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