MITT ROMNEY: 47 PERCENT

“In truth, . . .  the various Koch initiatives seem to do less well the more public and noisy they become. In the backrooms of Congress their operatives are skillful at getting tax breaks after regulatory concessions, and in low-turnout off-year elections, or in local and state contests, their money is often crucial to winning races where few are paying attention. (One result is that the ‘bench’ of progressive politicians moving up to higher office is thin.) But their initiatives fare badly out in the open. Mitt Romney, after all, was only enunciating the Koch line that stretched back to the patriarch in the 1930s when he explained that 47 percent of Americans would never vote for him because they were freeloaders who “believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, food, to housing, you name it.” It turned out that people didn’t like being called moochers—polls showed within days that 80 percent of the country knew about the remark, and the presidential race was effectively over.”

“The Koch Brothers’ New Brand,” a review in the New York Review [March 10, 2016; pp. 16-18] by Bill McKibben of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016).