The Obama administration prides itself on not dumbing things down for voters. President Obama’s political counselor David Axelrod has argued that whether it is a pestilent preacher, stimulus worries or blowback over changes to his terror policy, the president can talk frankly and at great length about issues and that average Americans can understand and follow along.
Sometimes it seems more like flip-flopping and nuance overload, but until now, the president has had success in at least buying himself more time with complex explanations that often include what sound like tough medicine for his audience or a harsh truth.
His speech on Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the prime example. It included Obama’s “typical” white grandmother’s racist impulses but contrasted them with the “understandable” frustration felt by white people over affirmative action. Obama started his speech toting the baggage of being a member of a church for two decades that was led by a racist and finished as a solomonic judge of racial guilt in America.
And Obama has again and again shown the ability to talk about issues that Democrats have typically avoided.
But it is not so much that Obama is leveling with the public as much as he is creating operational space for himself to redeploy his political assets.
After Obama’s prebuttal to Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Thursday speech on Guantanamo, we don’t know anything more about the administration’s policy on dealing with captured terrorists, just more about how Obama feels about the issue.
The speech bought Obama some time to deal with Democratic members of Congress who pushed back on importing Gitmo inmates and brushed by enough issues to give the president a path to climb down or step up later as politics demands.
And folks seem to be catching on to the murkiness that seems to always shroud the administration’s policies.
In the Economist out last week the magazine’s editors take Obama to task (almost) for his opaque approach to global warming. The Economist has hewed the establishment line on global warmism for a while, but tries to stop short of Gore-esque dudgeon.
The piece takes a look at what a laughingstock the Waxman-Markey energy bill has become – corporate giveaways for some and higher costs for all with precious little of the planet-soothing restrictions greenies demand.
Finally, a bill that Greenpeace and the Competitive Enterprise Institute can both hate!
The Economist argues that if the federal government is going to charge for pollution, a tax is a much clearer, fairer way to go about it. Businesses much prefer predictable costs to the lobbying game. Innovation is more likely because the government doesn’t pick winners and losers. The consumer knows upfront what the costs are and why they’re being assessed.
But the magazine explains how Obama encouraging the pale version of his cap and trade in Congress while applying new regulations himself is a rather dishonest bit of politicking:
“Meanwhile, Mr Obama continues to attack climate change from other angles. On May 19th he announced that he would impose tougher fuel-efficiency standards. Carmakers will have to produce vehicles that go eight miles farther on a gallon of petrol by 2016. Cars must eke out 39 miles (63km) per gallon, on average; light trucks must manage 30 miles. Carmakers, some of whom would be bankrupt if Mr Obama was not pumping them full of taxpayers’ money, meekly applauded. In the past an agreement such as this would have been thought impossible, the president crowed.
Mr Obama admitted that more fuel-efficient cars might cost more. But he promised that motorists would save thousands of dollars by cutting their fuel bills. In fact, they can already cut their fuel bills by buying smaller cars, but most choose not to. Mr Obama could discourage petrol use more directly and efficiently by taxing the stuff, but that would be unpopular. Ideally, politicians who want to save the planet would be honest with voters about how much this will cost. But America’s leaders do not seem to think Americans are ready for straight talk about energy.”
And that’s the reality for the administration as big policy changes like shutting down Gitmo, remaking health care and charging global warming fees come down to decisions. Obama can’t keep bluffing his way through.
Sooner or later, the president will have to explain where he stands on issues and how he means to get to the more promising future he describes for so many fields of human endeavor.
With Obama’s regulations and the Waxman cap and trade bill, Democrats have devised a plan with few of the market benefits of a carbon market and all of the disadvantages of a top-down, regulatory approach.
That’s not to say that there aren’t strong reasons to believe that the idea that capping U.S. emissions would make an iota’s difference in the Earth’s temperature but do plenty to reward friends of the political in-crowd.
But if the president wishes to move us down the path to a carbon-regulated future he might have more success if he actually gave the subject a little straight talk.
But as is his typical approach, Obama has so far not shown an interest in expending his own political capital in order to advance his policy aims and instead works through fiat cast as consensus or lets Congress take the hit.
Doing something as dramatic as increasing the cost of American energy in the name of stopping global warming will need a different approach. Trying to slip something by will achieve none of what the president promised in addition to scores of unintended consequences. A carbon tax might actually stick and would be a more transparent approach.
That the president is unwilling to follow that course tells us something about how serious he was about stopping the oceans’ rise.
