The Intimidation Game (23 page)

Josten and the chamber flatly denied the charge, and explained that the organization received only a small amount of money from foreign sources and that none of it went into domestic ads. The lie was so large that even the left-tilting mainstream fact-checking organizations had a field day. FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, ran a long piece under the headline and tag “Foreign Money? Really? Democrats peddle an unproven claim.” The writer, Brooks Jackson, explained that “Democrats, from President Barack Obama on down, are trying to turn an evidence-free allegation into a major campaign theme.” Jackson noted that the FEC allows organizations to take in foreign money and still make donations, so long as they have a “reasonable accounting method” and enough money from U.S. sources to cover the donations. Jackson ended, “Accusing anybody of violating the law is a serious matter requiring serious evidence to back it up. So far Democrats have produced none.”

The
New York Times
, hardly a chamber cheerleader, ran its own well-researched story, concluding, “There is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.” The
Times
noted that plenty of liberal groups, like the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO, also have international units and also spend money domestically. Other groups pointed out that the real offender in terms of foreign money was the union movement. According to the Center for Competitive Politics, close to half of the unions that are members of the AFL-CIO are international. And they presumably pay union dues.

The whole episode marked a height in cynical and unaccountable politics. The president of the United States singled out and accused a political opponent of a crime, on the basis of an undocumented and untrue slur. Josten is still stunned years later. “We have 114 American chambers of commerce physically located abroad. Their membership is composed of U.S. multinationals doing business abroad. We have an entire vetting process, whenever a new one is formed, to make sure it is not a phony government organization in some third-world country, but rather a legitimate chamber formed by U.S. money,” he notes. “The amount of dues that flow up to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is about $100,000 a year. That goes into our international division, which services them. $100,000 a year. Seriously. We have a more than $250 million budget.”

Yet Obama stubbornly kept repeating the claim. Then, as the president confronted growing press criticism for spreading misinformation, the White House abruptly changed tack, claiming that the real problem was “anonymity.” This was 2010 and it fit in neatly with Obama's campaign at the time against “shadowy” nonprofits. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs declared that the better chamber discussion needed to be about disclosing “the identities of [its] donors.” Obama Svengali David Axelrod also cleverly attempted to use the uproar to force the chamber to hand over the names the left so eagerly wanted. “I guess my answer to the chamber is just disclose where your money is coming from and that will end all the questions,” he told ABC News's Jake Tapper.
Time
magazine in a follow-up story wrote, “Such calls, says the chamber's executive vice president for government affairs, R. Bruce Josten, amount to an attempt to intimidate donors with the implicit threat of boycotts and harassment.” Josten was speaking from experience, having watched the coordinated activist campaigns against companies that spoke out against health care or climate.

The episode moved Bob Schieffer, the no-nonsense host of CBS's
Face the Nation
, to call bullshit on Axelrod during a Sunday appearance. “They do spend heavily on politics,” said Schieffer of the chamber. “But this part about foreign money, that appears to be peanuts, Mr. Axelrod. I mean, do you have any evidence that it's anything other than peanuts?” Axelrod, rather than answer the question, attempted to turn it around and force the chamber to prove a negative. “Well, do you have any evidence that it's not, Bob?” Schieffer didn't appreciate the dodge. He finished the segment with a withering appraisal: “I guess I would put it this way. If the only charge three weeks into the election that the Democrats can make is that somehow this may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign, is that the best you can do?”

It was. And from Axelrod's perspective, it was good enough. It was generating ugly headlines against the chamber, and keeping focus off the miserable Obama economy and track record. And the strategy was proving far more fruitful in other contexts.

One of these was the Minnesota governor's race. It was a made-to-order example of the financial pain and headache the left could inflict on any company that it knew was engaged in politics and then targeted. It explained why the chamber immediately dismissed Axelrod's suggestion that it list its corporate donors. The trade association had only just witnessed what liberals like Axelrod had done to Target Corp.

Target, the retail giant, is based in Minneapolis. It opened its first store in the state in 1962. Unsurprisingly, it has an abiding interest in a positive state business environment. In 2010 it saw an opportunity to further that via Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. Emmer, who'd served in the Minnesota House of Representatives, was running on lower business taxes and more jobs. That sounded good to Target, which in July 2010 gave $150,000 to an organization called Minnesota Forward—created by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and the Minnesota Business Partnership—which was running ads for Emmer.

The left tried to suggest that the Target donation was an example of the evil forces
Citizens United
had unleashed. It was a silly claim. None of this was secret; Minnesota Forward disclosed the contribution under state law. And none of it was new or outrageous. Target had a history of giving in state and local races. Its own political action committee, TargetCitizens, tended to spread donations evenly between federal Republicans and Democrats. And Target pointed out that its support for causes and candidates was always laser-focused on its “retail and business objectives,” which included “economic growth and job creation.”

Target's donation was clearly aimed at electing a governor with free-market priorities that would benefit consumers, workers, and retailers. But left-wing activists didn't care about this truth; they wanted to make Target an example. They combed through Emmer's record, looking for a politically sensitive issue, and landed on the candidate's opposition to gay marriage. At the time, Emmer wasn't out of the mainstream in that position. In 2008, the majority of Americans still opposed gay marriage, as did, for the record, Barack Obama.

But it's all in how you phrase it. In the activists' hands, being pro–traditional marriage was but a short hop and skip to being actively “antigay”—which Target now stood accused of, by virtue of its support of Emmer. MoveOn.org immediately organized a national boycott of the store, crafting a petition on its website. It was at least honest about its goals. It called on signers to agree, “I won't shop at Target until it stops spending money on elections. Companies like Target should stay out of elections, period.” The left leveraged social media platforms to turn the boycott into a nationwide cause. Facebook buzzed with fan pages such as “Boycott Target Until They Cease Funding Anti-Gay Politics.” YouTube videos featured former Target shoppers professing outrage. One, showcasing a mother telling her story of how she returned more than $200 of Target goods in solidarity with her gay son, went viral. “I'm going to boycott Target until they make this right,” she declared. Best Buy, which had also given money to Minnesota Forward, came in for the same treatment.

And what did Target need to make right? That was the joke. The Human Rights Campaign, an organization that supports gay rights, maintains what it calls its Corporate Equality Index, which annually ranks companies on its gay-rights policies. Target in 2009 and 2010 boasted a 100 percent score. The company was already offering domestic partnership benefits for employees. It had sponsored gay pride events around the state.

Yet Target couldn't withstand the assault. By August it had formally apologized for giving money to benefit Emmer. CEO Gregg Steinhafel meekly announced that the company would revise its entire policy on political donations. One major change: Target would henceforth require any trade association to which it gave money to refrain from using those dollars for campaign activities. This was exactly what the left had hoped for; it was a stunning victory. And it had won it, by the way, with a Minnesota disclosure law that had required Minnesota Forward to divulge Target's donation. Democrats were soon pushing that law as a model for the nation.

The left's decision to focus on Emmer's position on gay marriage was calculated and deliberate. It was part of a strategy that would later be disclosed by a man named Eric Burns. Burns had in a prior life been a staffer to Chuck Schumer, the New York senator who warned that his DISCLOSE Act was designed to make companies “think twice” about voicing an opinion. Burns became president of Media Matters, a Soros-funded outfit founded by liberal activist David Brock. It's a heavyweight in the left-wing universe, and in 2010 Burns and Brock released a strategy memo for a coalition of liberals, much of which was focused on their new tool, “disclosure.” The goal, said the memo, was to root out the names of corporate donors, which the left would use to “create a multitude of public relations challenges for corporations that make the decision to meddle in politics. Working with allied organizations we will utilize the database's information to provoke backlashes against companies, shareholders, employees and customers, and the public at large.” The memo explained that the coalition would use anything and everything to tar a business; it would not draw distinctions. “When businesses back candidates, Media Matters Action Network will portray it as a complete endorsement of everything that given politician has said or done.” (Media Matters Action Network is a 501(c)(4) group. It does not disclose its donors. And despite its active involvement in politics, it never ended up on a Lois Lerner list.)

When Josten says that “somebody” had to step up, this was why. The left had a very deliberate and organized plan after
Citizens United
—to get the federal government to harass and disclose the names of political actors, and then to use that information to isolate, humiliate, and intimidate those players out of politics on the back end.

Josten finds the attacks particularly frustrating, because, contrary to propaganda,
Citizens United
never did set off a rush of corporate spending. Even prior to the Supreme Court decision, more than half the states had no bar whatsoever on companies contributing directly in state and local elections. Yet even then, few did. Companies are nervy by nature. Some give; many don't. They are always wary of bad PR.

So while
Citizens
did give them more rights, it didn't result in a tidal wave of money. Even what corporate spending there is remains pathetic by comparison to union and liberal activist dollars. That goes even for the chamber. Yes, Donohue and Josten pumped up the political-spending budget. But the chamber's $35 million in 2012 expenditures has to be compared to $1.7 billion that the National Institute for Labor Relations Research estimates organized unions spent in that cycle. “We are an eat-what-you-kill organization; we have to beg people to make contributions,” says Josten. “Companies tend to give money to their specific trade association first. We are about fifth in everybody's line.”

Josten muses that what the left also always misses is that money never matters as much as ideas. He remembers billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson giving millions to Newt Gingrich's unsuccessful presidential run. Or Linda McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment magnate, who spent $100 million on two failed bids for the Senate in Connecticut. “Endless money. But did they win? No,” says Josten.

Josten these days spends phenomenal amounts of time educating corporate executives—about DISCLOSE (which Democrats continue to push); about
Citizens United
; about proxy battles; about campaigns like those against Target and Best Buy and the chamber. “It's something that has to be done, because those executives get nervous. They are responsible for the bottom line. And now politics has become more than civic debate; they worry it is a business risk.”

He also spends an inordinate amount of time educating Congress on the laws of the land. “Think about it. We've had enormous turnover. About 60 percent of Congress—they've only been here since the 2010 election. What the hell do they know about McCain-Feingold? Not much, is the answer,” he says.

Josten notes that he has on occasion gotten lucky; the left has slipped and made his job easier. The Media Matters memo is one example. He also references a 2013 article in the liberal publication
Mother Jones
, entitled “Revealed: The Massive New Liberal Plan to Remake American Politics.” In it, the reporter blew the lid off a private meeting attended by three dozen of the largest liberal organizations. The meet-up was by “invite only and off the record,” but it included the “top brass” of every influential left-wing organization in the country, from the NAACP, to the Sierra Club, to the unions, to Greenpeace. One goal of the meeting was to formulate a game plan to harass and intimidate companies. The attendees even listed a few targets, like Chevron, that they were already teeing up for particularly rough treatment. Another target was Google, which the group wanted to pressure out of its association with the chamber.

“You get a document like that, and it helps,” says Josten. “You take it to the C-suite and you say, ‘Don't take my word for it—this is what they said in their own words. So consider yourself warned. The whole game here is to embarrass you and create a backlash and damage your corporation.'” His advice to these executives is always the same: Stay strong, stay clear, stay the course. Giving in just encourages them; they sense weakness.