A new book from a former Koch Industries insider reveals that David and Charles Koch teamed with oil and tobacco interests to lay the groundwork for the Tea Party beginning in 1993, with the eventual goal of winning the presidency as early as this year.
“Poison Tea,” by Jeff Nesbit, former Vice President Dan Quayle’s communications director, details the birth of the movement from first-hand knowledge and the mining of millions of pages of documents including a page from Philip Morris’ magazine for smokers that in 1999 wrote of creating an anti-tax “Tea Party — Boston Style.”
Nesbit writes of witnessing the birth of the Tea Party when he was a consultant for the Koch-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy, the first of many groups the brothers, teaming with tobacco and oil interests, created to promote libertarian and anti-tax policies.
“The long rise of the Tea Party movement was well orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington,” he pens early in the book.
And it just might this year, or at least break the Republican Party, he adds. In the presidential race, the Kochs may have their prize in sight with the election of either Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz. Several Koch associates work for Trump, and Cruz has wooed Koch groups.
Nesbit, who now runs Climate Nexus, focused on climate change, said that in a perfect world the Kochs would have preferred New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as the nominee, but will settle for Trump and Cruz, both of whom threaten to change the GOP.
“They got the strategy right, if the goal is to make Washington dysfunctional and create the political space to take over the party. The wrong two presidential candidates just took advantage of it in 2016,” he said. “But either Trump or Cruz could still unify the party once the dust settles.”
The mainstream media is likely to portray the book, published by Thomas Dunne Books, as a hit job on the Kochs, but it is actually a story of success for their long-term campaign to build a “boots on the ground” movement in Washington and the states.
For example, he touches on the “myth” that the movement was created by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, whose famous rant against President Obama in 2009 included the “Tea Party” phrase.
“It’s a nice story,” writes Nesbit. “It’s also a carefully crafted myth. The truth is that the funding mechanisms, central messages, and key pillars of the Tea Party movement were many years in the making,” he adds.
And the goals have been taking control of of the GOP and winning the White House.
Concludes Nesbit: “The 2016 presidential campaign will, in many ways, be a personal fulfillment of decades of efforts to master the national political system. The long rise of the Tea Party movement — and the political education of Charles and David Koch from their entry into politics in the early, marginal efforts of the Libertarian Party to their roles now as kingmakers dictating central themes inside the GOP establishment orchestrated by their academic, policy, grassroots, media and political networks and refined through decades of work with campaigns built and financed by the tobacco companies — makes this clear to anyone with eyes to see.
“In truth, Charles Koch has no choice in 2016. He’s built a unique, unprecedented political movement that was designed to use corporate principles, funding, and interests to control at least one national party. It has achieved success everywhere — except at the White House. So he has to win the presidency. In the end, after all, just one thing really matters in politics, winning. Everything else is just second place.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
