Will Tom's $$$ help Tom crush Tom?
Will billionaire Tom Steyer help crush Tom Corbett?
Talk about major Tom! San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer -- as part of a coast-to-coast environmental crusade -- says he'll spend millions of dollars (maybe $8 million, maybe $15 million...who knows?) to make sure Tom Wolf defeats Tom Corbett in November. Here's my story from the front page today's Philadelphia Daily News:
TOM STEYER, a politically active hedge-fund billionaire from San Francisco who calls global warming "the greatest moral crisis of our time," draws the sign of the cross on his left hand with a ballpoint pen every day.
His right hand will soon be busy writing something else: large checks that he hopes will help elect Democrat Tom Wolf as the next governor of Pennsylvania.
Political advisers say the progressive, unconventional retired financier has decided to invest a fortune - estimates range from $8 million to a whopping $15 million, depending on the closeness of the race - to block Gov. Corbett from a second term because he believes that the Republican "den[ies] basic science" and is a tool of Big Oil and Gas.
Even in a state long considered the unregulated Wild West of campaign finance, the Pennsylvania megabucks plan by Steyer's NextGen Climate - part of a $100 million crusade to make climate change a "wedge issue" in seven key races - is unprecedented, and stunning in its scope. It may exceed - in both size and impact - the $10 million of Wolf's own dollars that propelled him to the Democratic nomination last month.