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