Billionaire Tom Steyer Wastes His Own Money...

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer has had a really bad year.

He failed to get other left-wing donors to join his crusade to make climate change the No. 1 election issue. Then he wasted nearly $75 million backing liberal candidates. Four out of the seven politicians he and his NextGen Climate Action group backed lost. And the few races where liberals won owed little or nothing to Steyer’s bizarre and sometimes inaccurate campaign ads.

Now Steyer is gearing up to try to influence the 2016 presidential election, but he may need to reexamine his strategy first. The Wall Street Journal argued that curbing carbon emissions, Steyer’s pet issue, “will be a campaign issue in two years,” but this doesn’t mean that Steyer was successful in trying to push that this year. Even liberal media outlets agreed that Steyer’s recent attempts had gone “mostly belly-up.” For good reason.

With the final election of 2014 ending in another GOP victory on Dec. 6 and the 2016 presidential race already begun, Steyer seems unwilling to admit those failures. “One thing is clear: we’ve made our mark, and this pivotal year for climate politics has given our efforts an unprecedented leg up,” he said in a post-election statement. He added “this is only the beginning” and vowed to “put climate on the ballot for our presidential candidates in 2016.” The media seem willing largely willing to excuse him, with Politico on Dec. 8, listing Steyer among possible replacements for retiring liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

But, 2014 isn’t done making him look bad. In a particularly cruel twist, the run-off for Louisiana’s Senate seat showcases two candidates, both who support the KXL pipeline. That’s the very project NextGen seeks to halt, despite the fact that it would create thousands of American jobs. The very project NextGen calls “a bad deal for the United States.”

One big reason for Steyer’s failure was his oddball campaign against conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch. NextGen spent $4,532,460 running ads accusing the Koch brothers of being “polluters,” “playing dirty” and of being from “out of state.” That last one was an especially odd criticism coming from another out-of-state billionaire. None of the seven political races Steyer focused on this year were in his home state of California.

That didn’t matter. Steyer’s anti-Koch efforts mirrored those of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Hill Democrats. One of the NextGen ads didn’t even bother with accusations, choosing instead to flash a picture of the Koch brothers while ominous music played.

But the Koch brothers weren’t the biggest spenders in 2014. Steyer was.
- See more at: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mike-ciandella/2014/12/24/45-million-smoke-how-billionaire-tom-steyers-anti-koch-ads-flopped-0#sthash.r5lEUDWw.dpuf