Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Bill Burton, the deputy press secretary for Obama in the White House, looks back at the level of obstruction in the administration’s first month as a complete shock. “They turned on Obama so early,” he later recalled ruefully. “Not only did we not have the answers yet, we barely knew where to sit down. The chairs in the White House were still spinning from the people who had left them.” Looking back, Burton shook his head at the administration’s naïveté. “No one at the time saw it coming.” Specifically, he said, “We didn’t really see the force, the outside money, until after he was elected. Then the first thing he had to do, the only thing he could do, was spend trillions and trillions of dollars, passing the stimulus bill first, and that led to Stimulus Two, and TARP, and the auto bailouts. The right-wing plutocrats really fed off of that. They tapped into this anger about spending.” He admits, “No one saw the Kochs or the Dick Armeys out there.”