This document was written to aid the 1980 Clark-Koch presidential campaign when David Koch was running for Vice President. The document appears to be a list of potential attack questions for Koch. The exact date of the document is unknown. The questions listed are broken into the categories personal, domestic, economic, and foreign policy.
The document bears the initials “EOK,” which may refer to Eric O’Keefe, a political operative who subsequently aided the Koch term limits campaign and more recently was embroiled in the criminal investigation surrounding Scott Walker’s dark money fundraising for groups like O’Keefe’s Wisconsin Club for Growth, though he denied any wrongdoing. A partisan state supreme court elected with the help of those dark money groups shut down that investigation.
A clipping of a page of this document was highlighted in Nicholas Confessori’s article about David Koch’s run for office, in the New York Times in 2014. Below is the entire document.
Its prep questions include:
- “Most of your campaign is financed by the oil-billionaire Koch family. Your ad in the “Oil and Gas Journal” indicated your support for complete deregulation of the energy industry. You are an attorney for Atlantic Richfield. Wouldn’t a Clark administration simply be rule by Big Oil?”
- “You certainly are anti-government. Are you an anarchist?”
- “Do you oppose licensing of doctors and lawyers? Wouldn’t the public be victimized by quacks?”
- “Your attacks on government regulation of the automobile industry suggest that all such regulation has been harmful and should be ended. What about pollution controls? Hasn’t government regulation in this area helped clean up the air, and wouldn’t an end to such regulation leave us all choking?”
- “Your party platform says that “An employer should have the right to recognize, or refuse to recognize, a union…” This would require repeal of the Wagner Act, and set unions back to their pre-1935 legal status. Do you support this plank?”
To read a similar document containing “nasty questions” anticipated by the Clark campaign, see Libertarian Presidential Candidate Materials, “More Nasty Questions”.