confusion about the Kochs and all that wild Libertarian political power

From Matt Welch in Reason...

Back in 2008, if you pressed a libertarian planning to vote for Barack Obama, chances are he’d yelp out the name Austan Goolsbee...

Two years later there probably isn’t a libertarian-leaning person on earth who still thinks Obama has it in him to pull a Nixon-goes-to-China when it comes to downsizing government. The president has followed up George W. Bush’s big-government disaster with a big-government catastrophe...And every day on the hustings in advance of the Democrats’ midterm drubbing, Obama campaigned against a wholly fictional Bush record of deregulation and spending cuts....

And what about our University of Chicago hero Austan Goolsbee? In September he became chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers...[and] trashed the most influential donors the libertarian universe has ever seen: Charles and David Koch, funders of the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Institute for Humane Studies, and much more...

...the administration has continued to single out the Kochs for criticism...in a way that the right focused on George Soros during the Bush era: as a shadowy, self-interested, all-powerful bogeyman attempting to hijack American democracy....

If these attacks appear to lack a consistent theme, it’s because Democrats need the Koch bogeyman to accomplish so many political tasks....

What a long, strange trip it has been for the Kochs. In 1980 David Koch was the vice presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party...I can’t help but smile at what this weirdly asymmetrical conflict symbolizes. There are millions of people—including me, including the Kochs, including people who have never heard of the Koch family—who feel some basic affinity for the notion that that government is best which governs least....

Yet libertarians are supposed to be a threat to the republic. Just imagine if we had any political power!