Hillary Clinton’s current campaign chairman was concerned about attracting unwanted political “baggage” by standing too close to President Obama’s record on climate change months before the Democratic candidate’s campaign was launched, according to illegally obtained emails released by the group WikiLeaks.
John Podesta, whose email account was hacked, raised the issue in vetting a speech Clinton was expected to deliver at a clean energy conference put on by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada in September 2014.
At the time, Podesta was serving at the White House as counselor to President Obama, but provided the feedback to Clinton through a private Gmail account.
Podesta had few problems with the speech but told a Clinton aide to make a slight change when referring to the president’s desire to have climate regulations in place in time for the December 2015 meeting in Paris, where a global deal on climate change would be worked out.
“In the Paris graph, I think a reference to Obama’s Climate Action Plan and particularly the power plant rule has changed the international dynamic and made the U.S. credible and a global leader that make the chances of success much greater,” Podesta wrote.
“That’s an easy place to be generous to him without taking on any baggage,” he added.
Clinton has said she supports Obama’s power plant rule, called the Clean Power Plan, but hasn’t referred to it too often on the campaign trail. Instead, she promotes her own clean energy agenda of deploying 500 million solar panels to provide clean, low-carbon electricity while expanding the number of jobs.
There has been a clear need to distance herself from Obama’s policies so as to not play into Republican criticisms that her election would equate to a third Obama term.
The Clean Power Plan is undergoing a court review by a 10-judge federal appeals court panel, which is expected to go to the Supreme Court next year no matter what the judges decide. The plan directs states to cut their greenhouse gas emissions a third by 2030. A group of 28 states and more than 100 groups are fighting the climate plan in court.
Aligning herself too closely to the plan could set Clinton up for a fall if the Obama plan is curtailed by the court.
Podesta appeared to want Clinton to acknowledge the progress Obama made in addressing the issue of climate change without ascribing too much of her own policy aspirations to the president directly.
Even more telling, the original version of Clinton’s speech doesn’t refer to the climate rules at all in the runup to Paris. She was more concerned with the negotiations that Obama and she, as secretary of state, worked out in preliminary deals with China, India and Brazil in 2009 to lay the groundwork for the global climate deal.
