Koch who? Classic ...

A national political analyst put on Twitter in midweek that she knew of a focus group of 10 Arkansas women who were swing voters. She said none of the women knew anything about the Koch brothers.

That news led to celebratory chortling on Twitter by top staff members for U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton's Republican campaign for the U.S. Senate.

It is revealing that the Cotton people would celebrate this news--not that the focus group revealed a dismissive awareness of the Kochs or an evolving opinion that Cotton's alliance with the Kochs was no big deal in the context of greater issues, but instead an absolute and unanimous ignorance of the Kochs.

Though those 10 women don't know it, Cotton's campaign is lavishly backed by the Koch brothers' political operations. Cotton himself blew off the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival to revel in coziness with the Kochs, the billionaire industrialists Charles and David, at an exclusive resort in California.

David Ray, the press spokesman for Cotton's campaign, linked the focus-group news on Twitter. He added that swing voters obviously aren't reading U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor's fundraising appeals, which usually invoke the Kochs. Nor, he said, are they reading this newspaper column, which often seeks to inform readers of the Kochs' arch-conservative interests and Cotton's fealty to those interests.

Then there was State Rep. John Burris, an able legislator from Harrison. He got beat for the state Senate in June in part because of attacks on him for helping concoct the private-option form of Medicaid expansion. The Kochs just hate government programs like that.

Yet Burris maintains deep devotion to Cotton, in whose campaign he works. And Burris put on Twitter that he found "hilarious" this news that these 10 women had no knowledge of these brothers whom Democrats were seeking to install as villains.

Two days later, political reporter Molly Ball with The Atlantic provided more detail about the focus group.

It was assembled in Little Rock. It was evenly divided between Barack Obama voters and Mitt Romney voters. The women were most influenced by fear for their families in this crazy world of foreign conflict, school shootings and racial tension. The Kochs? Didn't know them.

No one would say that mothers should care as much about the Koch brothers as about those raging worries. The point is not the women's understandable, indeed compelling, priority. It's that they are wholly unaware of the Kochs. It's that voters need to round out their most basic and powerful fears with more thorough and sophisticated political information.

If Arkansas voters know of the Kochs and don't care about them, or if they agree with Kochian views and applaud Cotton's 100 percent voting record on the Kochs' grading system--well, all right, then.

But that voters are wholly oblivious--that may be a matter for high-fiving at Cotton headquarters, but it's a matter in my view of abject failure for representative democracy.

So, in the public interest, here are the Kochs, Charles and David:

Originally out of Wichita, they are multibillionaire industrialists who control the nation's second-largest privately owned enterprise.

Koch Industries is in oil and timber (it owns Georgia Pacific) and myriad other enterprises, including the steel mill the taxpayers and teachers of Arkansas are helping fund near Osceola.

The brothers are so conservative in their economic and political views--so opposed to government taxation and regulation--that they are nigh unto libertarian. In fact, in 1980, David Koch was the vice presidential nominee on the Libertarian ticket.

The Libertarian platform that year called for abolishing Social Security, Medicare, farm payments, public schools, a minimum wage, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and post-Watergate restrictions on what the Kochs and others could spend spreading political influence.

The brothers soon abandoned the Libertarian association as impractical and began funding conservative think tanks tied to the Republican Party.

Then the Obamacare emergence agitated them as nothing else. Then the Citizens United case turned them loose to spend as much money as they wanted on politics, and spend a lot of that without transparency or accountability.

They fund basic operations like Americans for Prosperity, which goes door-to-door for Cotton on weekends and drags out Wanda and Jerry for television advertising. Otherwise they send money to a trust that, often stealthily, distributes the funds to so many conservative political operations that pundits have begun referring to the vast network as the Kochtopus.

So there it is. The Kochs employ a lot of people. They generate a lot of economic activity. They are entitled to their political views. Current case law says they may spend all they want to advance those views, often without our knowing that the money is coming from them.

Tom Cotton is one of their favorite politicians. They've had him out for steak and right-wing conversation.

So process that information as you please.

And if you know of any Arkansas women recently in a focus group, you might send this column to them.

------------v------------

John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 09/14/2014

Upcoming Events