David Brooks warns the president:
Brooks talks about the stimulus, health care, the budget, but he doesn’t mention cap and trade. It’s an odd omission. I’ve talked to a lot of Republicans and a few Democrats on the Hill, most point to cap and trade as the point at which things really began to fall apart for the left. Clearly Democrats underestimated the toll that the stimulus would take on Obama’s agenda. Putting Joe Biden in charge of selling it as a success is proof enough that they didn’t understand how important it was for the stimulus to be perceived as something other than a total failure, if not an outright success. But then came cap and trade, and Nancy Pelosi and the Obama administration stood behind the Blue Dogs telling them to advance in the face of withering fire — and threatening to shoot them in the back if they didn’t. Advance they did, but the Senate never picked up the legislation, and it has no serious plans to. The Blue Dogs took a huge risk for nothing. All of which explains this quote from the Politico today:
Cap and trade was the overreach moment — that was where Obama really started to lose the middle.
