Grayson tries to fundraise off the ‘Kochtopus’

Congressman Alan Grayson, D-Orlando, sent out a fundraising email to supporters attacking New York billionaire David Koch, who Jane Mayer of the New Yorker recently profiled as a major donor to conservative causes.

The neologism for all of his ideological groups is known as the “kochtopus.” Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group founded by Koch, is spending $1.4 million to run an ad in several states, including Florida, in Grayson’s district. The email reads:

I said that someone else would be the real opponent. Now we know who that is.

His name is David Koch. He has $17 billion. And he is spending $250,000 of that in attack ads against me this week.

David Koch is the owner of the second largest private company in America. He made his money the old-fashioned way: he inherited it. Incredibly, his father got rich helping to industrialize and arm the Soviet Union.

Koch lives in New York. He often attends the theater. As far as we know, he has never been to Orlando. But he wants to choose who represents Orlando in Congress. And it isn’t Alan Grayson.

Democrats have not attacked Koch in the same way that Republicans have attacked Democratic billionaire fundraiser George Soros, at least partially because Koch and his brother are media-shy about politics to the point of secrecy (they declined to be interviewed for Mayer’s 10,000 word article), whereas Soros wrote a book and proclaimed before the 2004 election that defeating Bush was a “matter of life and death.”

Koch’s group, Americans for Prosperity, did catch President Obama’s attention at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in Austin in August when he was talking about the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. He said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”

Luke Johnson reports on Florida for The American Independent.