Now you have to listen to Tom Steyer

For Steyer, that world is composed of a series of complicated paradoxes. Among them, Steyer is a former hedge fund manager-turned-environmental activist who, when he launched his presidential candidacy last July, billed himself as an optimistic populist. This new face seemed improbable, considering Steyer spent millions in the past two years climate-mongering and attempting to oust President Trump via impeachment.

With little grassroots support and only his advisers begging him to run, Steyer’s chances seemed slim. It didn’t help that he dresses more like a character actor than a president, still wearing that same African belt, an obvious rotation of threadbare blazers, and a closet full of nearly identical tartan ties that look like they came off the clearance rack at Jos. A. Bank.

So, he’s taken heat for all of it. After all, what populist essentially buys his way onto the debate stage? Only a spendthrift billionaire. What kind of person would spend two years collecting names of people who want to impeach the president and then use that list to launch his own campaign? Only a hypocritical opportunist. And what kind of weirdo (billionaire or not) would wear the same red, tartan tie pretty much every day? Only a Tom Steyer.

And it’s only a Tom Steyer who could mount such a colorful campaign to amplify the underlying paradox of his entire political career. He has bound together the seemingly contradictory issues of environmentalism and campaign finance reform in a beautifully cynical embrace that both serves his personal interests and, if his presence in the January debate is any measure, actually appeals to some of the public.

Steyer’s pitch works like this: On the one hand, he is a strident opponent of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which gives wide latitude to nonprofit corporations and labor unions to advocate directly in political elections. Steyer calls that arrangement “undemocratic,” “unfair,” and a whole host of other “un”s. If he had his way, corporations and special interest groups wouldn’t have any say in politics. The people would decide important matters through “direct democracy.” But he’s willing to make an exception for corporations on his other focus issue: climate change.

How convenient, then, that Steyer’s own network of advocacy groups, centered on his flagship organization NextGen America, specializes in promoting Democratic candidates who place combating climate change, along with a raft of other liberal policies, at the top of their agendas.

“I’m 100% behind the idea of people having an equal access to thought, but more than that, I wish I didn’t live in a society where someone like me felt like they had to spend so much time, energy, and money to reform democracy,” Steyer said in New Hampshire while he justified NextGen’s aggressive drives to get out the liberal vote in recent congressional elections.

And, Steyer was quick to add, with an issue as important as the climate, his investments are necessary for human survival. There is no time, he said, to wait around for uncommitted officials to make democratic reforms within the existing structures.

“We don’t have a choice,” Steyer said. “Literally, it’s an emergency. Our house is on fire. And so, we literally don’t have time to convince a bunch of legislatures.”

Maybe so. Or maybe Steyer is just frustrated with his past results. He’s been playing the advocacy game full-time since 2012 with limited success. The year 2020 marks a shift in strategy. Since the candidates Steyer funded over the years have failed him, he seems to think he has no choice but to run for president and do it all himself.

“We can’t get any of the progressive policies we want until we take back the government of the United States,” he told the crowd.

Steyer sees himself as a savior to America — and of his own investments. If it’s convenient that Steyer believes in excusing his push for campaign finance reform on account of climate change, then it’s doubly convenient that his former hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management (which still manages a big chunk of Steyer’s roughly $1.6 billion fortune), stands to profit from the nation’s investment in green energy.

Steyer first saw political opportunity during the rise of Barack Obama. In the 2008 election, he raked in millions for Obama after it became clear Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to win the nomination. By September, Steyer was one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, pulling in $7.8 million at one event, the largest single-night haul of the Obama campaign.

When Obama won in November, rumors began flying that Steyer, who at the time was steering Farallon through the global financial crisis, was being considered for treasury secretary. Obama passed, but the missed opportunity whetted Steyer’s appetite for politics.

“They should have listened to my brother,” said Steyer’s brother, Jim, when Obama picked Timothy Geithner for the Treasury instead. “He’s smarter and richer than they are. It’s that simple. Obama did not recognize Tom’s talent. He will rue the day that he failed to recognize it.”

In the early 2010s, Tom Steyer began proving his talent. Former Clinton adviser John Podesta invited him to join the board of the Center for American Progress after the 2008 election. This led to more involvement in dark money operations, and, after a snowshoeing trip, Podesta convinced the Steyers to organize Next Generation Climate (which later became NextGen America).

Steyer also had recently begun giving money to fight ballot initiatives in California, notably Proposition 23, which would have reduced state-mandated cuts in greenhouse gases. Steyer dumped $5 million into defeating it. It was his first big victory. When discussing NextGen in 2011, Steyer promised that the group would be a “fiercely” independent voice in public policy debates, aimed at winning more battles such as Prop 23.

The next year, Steyer went on the offensive and dumped $29.6 million into supporting California Proposition 39, which would close a “corporate loophole” that allowed multistate corporations to pay taxes out of state. Steyer won the battle, but critics said that his cash-heavy involvement had, in effect, defeated the anti-corporate spirit of the ballot measure.

These early successes encouraged Steyer to go national. So in 2013, he retired from Farallon to become, in his words, “a professional pain in the ass.” First on the docket: Steyer picked a fight over Keystone XL, a pipeline that would connect oil sands in Alberta to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. Proponents of the pipeline said it would make the U.S. more energy independent. Critics noted that its pathway through the Nebraska Sandhills, as well as the strip-mining methods used to extract it from the Canadian sands, posed serious environmental concerns.

The fight over Keystone occupied a good chunk of national attention through much of Obama’s second term. Most of that is thanks to the efforts of Steyer. In addition to the millions of dollars dumped into stopping Keystone, Steyer petitioned Obama personally to intervene at a 2013 fundraiser in his home, where he led a group of 15 friends to “hammer” the president on Keystone.

Obama was diplomatic, but he didn’t give ground either way. Later that night, he publicly addressed Steyer’s concerns, pointing out that the worries of a San Francisco billionaire were not necessarily the concerns of the average voter.

“The politics of this are tough,” Obama said. “Because if you haven’t seen a raise in a decade; if your house is still $25,000, $30,000 underwater; if you’re just happy that you’ve still got that factory job that is powered by cheap energy; if every time you go to fill up your old car because you can’t afford to buy a new one, and you certainly can’t afford to buy a Prius, you’re spending 40 bucks that you don’t have, which means that you may not be able to save for retirement … you may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern.”

So, Steyer set out to make it people’s No. 1 concern. He spoke at a February 2013 climate rally in Washington about Keystone and nearly chained himself to the fence outside the White House alongside activist and climate writer Bill McKibben. His brother, Jim, talked him out of it. Steyer then filmed a series of commercials railing against the pipeline that were strikingly similar in tone to his more recent impeachment commercials.

Shortly before the Keystone controversy, Steyer’s name started circulating as a possible replacement for the secretary of energy. Podesta vouched for Steyer to the administration, calling him a “fabulous” choice and saying that he had “the right skill set, the understanding and attitude to lead an energy transformation in this country.”

But as people gave him a second look, what they found was suspicious. Despite speaking out so fervently against Keystone, in the early 2000s, Steyer had heavily invested in the company that was attempting to build the pipeline. And though NextGen dealt almost exclusively with climate change activism, Farallon invested a great portion of Steyer’s wealth in fossil fuels.

Critics accused him of cronyism. Steyer said he would divest from the energy companies and focus on investing only in green energy henceforth.

But divestment created a new potential problem. If Steyer was investing in green energy and using his political action committee to advocate for green energy, then didn’t he stand to gain financially from his activism? How would that make him any better than the corporations he so often accused of “buying” the government?

Steyer never had to answer those questions. Although Obama did eventually reject Keystone, he passed on Steyer for energy secretary.

But by 2014, Steyer had proven he didn’t need to be inside the government to get what he wanted. He got into congressional politics instead, essentially buying the election of Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey (who later became the first co-sponsor of the Green New Deal) in a 2013 special election. The same year, he intervened in the gubernatorial campaign of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, using NextGen to raise money and get out the vote. Both candidates promised to make the environment one of their top concerns.

Of course, it hasn’t been all wins. Although Steyer was the largest single donor on environmental issues in 2014, he only won three out of the seven races in which he invested a total of $67 million. Steyer only achieved middling success in 2016 and 2018, with the latter election hampered by his push for impeachment.

His side projects haven’t fared much better. Need to Impeach, which he launched in 2017, may have been the first out the gate on organizing the impeachment effort against Trump, but it lost steam when Steyer jumped in the race over the summer.

Trump, though, wasn’t ever his primary target anyway. The real problem, for Steyer, is that Obama wasn’t liberal enough. Even at the New Hampshire town hall, he offered a subtle critique of Obama’s climate policies.

“The president does have the power to move things unilaterally,” he said in reference to addressing the climate. “That’s exactly what Obama was doing. He was just doing it really slowly. He was trying to change the rules of how we were going to generate energy around the country.”

That wasn’t what Steyer wanted. He has pledged time and again to be more aggressive should he become president.

“I’ll declare a state of emergency on Day One,” he said (and reiterated in the January debate). “I will not wait for Congress. I will use the emergency powers of the presidency to start making changes. I will do it from an environmental justice standpoint, and I will make it the No. 1 priority for us.”

A unilateral push for a pet project: That’s essentially what all the other billionaires in this race aim to do. But Steyer isn’t quite like the others. He’s not a personality like Trump, who drifted into politics on a whim and woke up president. And he’s not a martyr like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who only wants to preserve Clintonism. And, despite the opinions of his critics, Steyer is not another woke capitalist like former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, whose flirtations with running for president stemmed more from a general discomfort with his party than from any political horse sense.

Steyer is his own sort of paradox. And as he rushes into 2020, his dual push for the environment and campaign finance reform have him all tangled up in himself.

The situation is very much like the 1995 gala for San Francisco’s Discovery Museum, where Steyer offered to raise money in a novel way: by swallowing the live goldfish swimming in the table centerpieces. $1,000 a pop.

“Delicious,” he said afterward, no doubt grimacing at the irony of killing one little fish to save all the big ones.

Nic Rowan writes from Washington, D.C.