At the mention of polar bears, the crowd groaned and booed. Lonegan had them. He stoked their discontent by claiming the EPA was suppressing a report showing that the polar bear population was actually increasing, in spite of Al Gore’s hysterical warnings. To underscore his point, Lonegan introduced his guest speaker, a man dressed in a polar bear suit, who had been wandering through the crowd carrying a sign that said, “I am AFP!”
The guy in the polar bear suit, introduced as “Prospero the Polar Bear,” stepped up to the microphone as the crowd started to chuckle.
“I don’t know—how many of you can hear me?” Prospero asked into the microphone, as it reverberated with feedback. “There’s too many polar bears!”
This drew sweeping laughter. “When I grew up, there was plenty of space,” Prospero continued. “Now there’s fifty thousand of us. And we just keep making more and more. They say it’s getting warm and icebergs are melting. Well, I needed more space, so I came down here.” The Prospero routine killed. As Prospero stepped back, Lonegan took the microphone and quoted the founding fathers and the US Constitution, driving home the importance of liberty and the constraints that must be placed on government. The rhetoric was elegant and forceful. It equated the cap-and-trade bill with government tyranny, and the fight against the bill with America’s primal struggle against oppression.
Lonegan’s rhetoric was strategic. By emphasizing the centrality of climate change legislation to popular discontent with American politics in 2009, he was carrying forward the corporate lobbying campaign that Charles Koch had initiated from the boardroom in Wichita. This strategy was central to AFP’s role in Koch’s political network. From the earliest days of AFP’s inception, the group operated as something like a fast-food franchise. AFP was composed of semiautonomous state chapters, but all of them served products from the same menu. The menu was designed with great care and specificity by Charles and David Koch and their lieutenants in Koch’s lobbying operations. This meant that state-level directors had a lot of autonomy. Lonegan developed his own pool of local donors and had the freedom to hire his own field directors and to determine where he spoke. But ultimately Lonegan and other state directors were told by AFP headquarters what they should say and how they should say it.
“I had to report to the national office,” Lonegan recalled. “They gave guidance on where our issues would lie. . . . So, I would report regularly to my boss on what issues were emerging, and then we’d determine how they’d want to address it. Not every issue that I saw as an issue did they think was an issue.”
This blend of local autonomy with centralized control created a political organization that was uniquely powerful and effective. AFP could mobilize the type of popular citizen involvement that most people referred to as grassroots support. But it coupled this popular support with intelligence and guidance developed inside one of the most well-funded corporate lobbying operations in America. This meant that AFP could get people marching in the streets, and it could get them marching in the exact streets and zip codes of congressional districts where their marching would most effectively benefit Koch Industries’ strategic interests. The lobbying shop, under Philip Ellender, attained the kind of real-time, granular political intelligence that only the largest corporations had the resources to develop. That information was then shared with a multistate network of ground-level activists of the kind that Lonegan had built over many years in New Jersey.
Koch’s lobbyists were unique in their ability to closely coordinate with the network of “third-party” groups that Koch Industries supported and nurtured. Koch’s lobbying office held conference calls “daily—multiple times every day” with Koch operatives who coordinated the activities of the third-party groups, according to one person familiar with Koch’s political operations.
The coordination could also occur at the highest levels. Richard Fink, Charles Koch’s top political lieutenant, sat on AFP’s board of directors from the beginning. He also sat in on the lobbying strategy meetings in Washington of the kind that were attended by Ellender and the compliance lawyer David Hoffmann.
The potency of this tight coordination would not be felt during AFP’s early years. During the George W. Bush era, AFP wasn’t much more than a political sideshow. Even by 2008, the organization was doing the political equivalent of cheap stunt work. The group hired out a hot-air balloon to fly around with a placard claiming that concern over climate change was nothing more than “hot air.” It hired cameramen to accost people who showed up for an Al Gore speech on global warming the summer of 2008, asking them why they drove to the event if driving meant that they burned fossil-fuels.
AFP’s full power was not mobilized until the Waxman-Markey bill threatened Koch Industries. As the threat of regulations on carbon emissions increased, Charles and David Koch dramatically increased the funding and reach of Americans for Prosperity. In 2007, the group had a budget of $5.7 million. By 2009, that budget was $10.4 million. In 2010, it was $17.5 million.
In 2009, AFP became a central part of the Koch network’s political influence operation. The group filed paperwork for chapters in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. The state chapters opened pages on Facebook and built e-mail lists for volunteers. Lonegan had a hard time keeping up with the increases in funding, staff, and new state chapters.
While the funding increases were important for AFP, something else was happening that was even more significant for the group. Lonegan and AFP finally had an audience. After Barack Obama’s election, Lonegan was no longer speaking to crowds of four or five people at public libraries—he was speaking to hundreds. The crowd that showed up for the Independence Day rally was just the beginning. There were people everywhere, even in New Jersey, who were fed up with the direction of American politics and were becoming activists for the first time in their lives. This movement would come to call itself the Tea Party.
As it turned out, Charles Koch had laid out a white tablecloth and fine china for this tea party many years in advance. The causes Charles Koch had been advocating—cutting the national debt and halting the reach of federal government into private markets—were causes that Tea Party activists cared about passionately.
Koch Industries and the leaders of Americans for Prosperity did not create the Tea Party or even orchestrate it. But they were ready for it, and prepared to steer it and shape its concerns. Lonegan and others at AFP helped make climate change regulation a central focus of the Tea Party movement. When Lonegan hosted rallies, he and his team were ready to record the e-mail address of anyone who shared it. They made phone trees and hosted volunteer training sessions. They passed out the phone numbers of local congressmen to activists and coached them on the best time to call. (Late night was sometimes best so that volunteers could leave voicemails, which would be waiting in big batches when the politician showed up for work the next day.) They taught volunteers the fine art of calling talk-radio programs and getting on the air, coaching them to mention the right website address or phone number when they were on the air.
Lonegan and his colleagues did more than just get Tea Party activists to focus on the Waxman-Markey bill. Americans for Prosperity also helped direct the activists’ passion toward a very specific group of targets: Republican politicians. Attacking the Republican party was one of AFP’s central strategies from the earliest days. In 2006, Lonegan attended a private AFP event hosted by Charles and David Koch, in Aspen, Colorado. The event was an annual symposium attended by wealthy conservative political donors, academics, and activists that Charles Koch began to convene in 2003, just as he helped launch Americans for Prosperity. The seminars were another innovation in Charles Koch’s broader political strategy: rather than fund his political causes alone, Charles Koch sought to enlist fellow donors. Twice a year, the donors attended seminars in Aspen, Palm Springs, or other scenic getaways, pledging their money to Koch’s causes and hearing speeches from politicians who auditioned for Koch’s political support. When Lonegan heard Charles Koch speak at the seminar in 2006, he was inspired by Koch’s ambitious vision and strategic intelligence. Lonegan was also impressed by Charles Koch’s strategy of using his donor group’s resources to attack conservatives rather than liberals. The strategy seemed counterintuitive, but effective.