$32 billion can make a lot of difference — and enemies — as George Soros has proven

By Tom Baxter

George Soros’ name gets dropped a lot in Georgia, but seldom with much elaboration.

For Republicans, like those in the General Assembly promoting the new law banning outside groups from contributing any money to help fund local elections, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, just the words “Soros-backed” evoke an ominous effort by shadowy outsiders to control voters’ lives. For Democrats, the mention of Soros’ name amounts automatically to an anti-Semitic insinuation, linking the 92-year-old Holocaust survivor with a host of conspiracy theories.

That, pretty much, is the end of the discussion, or at least the intelligent part of the discussion. You seldom see much serious examination of what the impact of Soros’ massive spending has been, or how his investing philosophy relates to his political beliefs.

One indisputable fact about Soros is that he has made an enormous amount of money and has not been shy about spending it on his beliefs. Much of the $32 billion he has contributed through his Open Society Foundations has been spent in the Eastern European nations left after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, on a wide variety of programs intended to promote democracy and openness. Even Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who would become Soros’ nemesis and the source of much of the anti-Semitic mania surrounding him, attended Oxford University on an Open Society grant.

Republicans might well point out that Democrats routinely invoked the name of the Koch brothers for years when they were talking about the malign effect of money in politics. Soros has, in fact, spent big in U.S. politics, quite separately from the activities in Europe which made him a Jewish target of pro-Russian, anti-Democratic regimes there. But that separation is hard to maintain when American conservatives hold up Orban himself as a model.

In Europe, Soros has been portrayed as a master manipulator, fomenting the pro-Western takeovers in Ukraine and the other Georgia. Politicians in the United States have aimed some of the same rhetoric at him, with less justification.

By any standard, the Koch brothers made the most effective use of personal fortunes for political purposes in the modern era. By focusing their efforts and their considerable fortune on state legislatures, the Koch brothers gave Republicans an enormous advantage in the redistricting process which determines the balance of power in Congress and did more than any other individuals to erode the power of unions in this country. By the end of his life, Charles Koch publicly regretted his role in increasing political divisions in this country. But no one can say that he and his brother spent their money heedlessly.

Soros, on the other hand, has spread a lot of money around on causes, campaigns and candidates with mixed results. As an investor he hasn’t been afraid to make big bets against conventional wisdom, as he did in his most famous trade, shorting the Bank of England for a profit of a billion dollars. He’s followed a similar philosophy in his political contributions. He gave more than $1.2 million to U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign, which could be considered expensive but effective. He gave $3.5 million to Stacey Abrams’ campaign, which could not be rated as wise an investment.

Should a private individual be able to circumvent spending limits to funnel that kind of money into campaigns through dark money loopholes? No. But the guard rails aimed at preventing this kind of excess were removed by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and endorsed by Republicans in Congress. Soros is routinely being condemned in conservative circles for playing by the rules his critics made.

By the way, now that local election offices have been protected from being unduly influenced by a free-spending liberal fat cat willing to help them pay their expenses, how do we plan to meet the increasing costs of holding elections? This week brings the news from Axis that Cobb County election director Janine Eveler is retiring, joining the directors in Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Macon-Bibb and Augusta-Richmond counties who have left within the past two years. We’d better wake up, quickly, to the problems that are making these jobs harder to fill.