Now that Tom Steyer has launched his SuperPAC’s first attack ad of the 2014 election, it’s worth re-visiting his history of ignoring Washington State’s public disclosure laws as we prepare to see his millions put to work to advance his extreme agenda here.
Tom Steyer started dropping his millions this week in attack ads going after Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst – the same week she came back from National Guard duty on behalf of her state.
While Steyer has made it clear he is putting his money where his (very big) ego is to advance his extreme global warming views, his attack on Ms. Ernst doesn’t mention the environment. Instead, it’s a cookie-cutter negative ad, hitting the Republican nominee for being against tax increases.
Unfortunately, we can expect to see more of Steyer’s sleazy approach over the last 100 days of the campaign. Thanks to his strong support for Jay Inslee’s own extreme agenda – like raising our state’s gas taxes by up to $1.17 per gallon – it is expected that Steyer will be dropping some of his own “dirty money” in our highly-contested state senate races.
It’s all part of Steyer’s master plan, which according to the Sacramento Bee is “trying to do to climate change what anti-smoking activists did to tobacco, accusing opponents of denying basic science. Steyer has already put $16 million into his group this year. And he brushes off Republican attacks that he’s a hypocrite because his hedge fund owned big polluters like an Australian coal mine: “Politics is a full-contact sport,” he says. (Sacramento Bee)”
Steyer’s arrogance is stunning even for a California hedge fund billionaire. Even after both the New York Times and the Washington Post pointed out Steyer’s hypocrisy, he assumes that the Democrat Party and Jay Inslees of the world will overlook that in exchange for campaign cash – and he’s probably right.
Again, as the Bee pointed out “To bring about political change, Steyer is employing that old-fashioned red-blooded billionaire technique of spending money. Although a budget of $100 million has been widely reported, Steyer won’t specify how much he intends to spend to elect climate-change allies this year, except to say he has not met a political consultant who knows how to spell the word ‘budget.’”
So that’s what we can unfortunately expect from Inslee’s best billionaire friend – more attack ads, not based on fact, but based on “Disruption Through Tobacco-ization.” And an aopproach that thinks so little of our state’s voters that Steyer’s SuperPAC will simply make up the claims so it can “target candidates who deny basic science and leverage the negative construct of being anti-women, anti-immigrant and anti-science,” all according to the “playbook” the Sacramento Bee reported on.
