The Left’s Favorite Bogeymen

Cillizza considers why Harry Reid has been vilifying the Koch brothers from the Senate floor:

The more he talks about the Kochs, the more — he hopes — rank and file Democrats get fired up to turn out to stick it to the Kochs. And the more — he hopes — major Democratic donors open up their checkbooks to counter the Kochs spending.

Sargent’s take:

As I noted the other day, this is all about creating a framework within which voters can be made to understand the actual policy agenda Republicans are campaigning on. … [The Koch attacks] aren’t really about the Kochs. They are a proxy for the one percent, a means through which to tap into a general sense that the economy remains rigged in favor of the very wealthy.

Waldman doubts this strategy will pay dividends:

The problem is that most Americans have no idea who Charles and David Koch are. Yet they’re already being featured in ads like this one in which we see their picture without any explanation. I’d be interested to see a poll on their name ID, but until somebody does one, I’d guess that maybe 10 percent of voters are familiar with them. Now maybe between now and November, Democrats can successfully educate enough of the voters on the Kochs to have a real impact. But it won’t be easy.

Like Cillizza, Alex Roarty thinks the target audience is donors more than voters:

Although most citizens may not know who the Kochs are, liberal activists certainly do—including the wealthy ones, from whom the Democrats are desperately trying to coax the kind of large donations that will let them push back more forcefully in TV ads. And the Kochs do complicate the GOP’s own political efforts, too, as when their company closed down a small plant in Alaska. It wasn’t a game-changer for the Alaska race, but it did allow Democrats to blast the GOP field’s ties to the brothers.

But those efforts are about mitigating the damage done by the [Americans For Prosperity’s] ads, and not necessarily a way to start scoring points of their own.

How Morrissey sees the attacks:

When asked to rank their top priority, unemployment and jobs topped yesterday’s Gallup poll list, while environmental issues and global warming didn’t even make the list. Income inequality, by the way, polled 2% at the bottom. They’re flailing, and the reek of desperation is only getting more obvious.

Update from a reader:

Ed Morrissey conveniently missed the forest for the trees. Individuals like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Shaun McCutcheon, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Tom Steyer are all corrupting the political process by dropping huge piles of money on political advocacy and pushing the president and Congress to listen to their opinions and sign into law policies that they support rather than listening to and signing into law policies that the voters who elected them support. This Gallup poll showed that Americans in July 2012 believed reducing corruption in the federal government was the second-most important task for the future President Obama or Romney to tackle. Conveniently, it’s also the second-most important task in the poll that Morrissey cited as well!