As the bumper sticker up in the Noteworthy box indicates, something pretty remarkable happened yesterday: the House GOP’s leader on energy policy, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, publicly apologized to BP’s CEO for the terrible treatment he’s been receiving from the Obama administration. Barton was particularly aggrieved by the “shakedown” that convinced BP to devote so much of its hard-earned profits to relief and restitution for affected Gulf residents.
Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman of Politico summed up the political impact of Barton’s act of fealty to Big Oil quite well:

It would have been bad enough for the GOP if a backbencher had accidentally strayed wildly off message, but Barton, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is the face of the party on energy policy — and his comments were intentional. So rather than talking about BP’s culpability and the Obama administration’s response, Washington was fixated on a Texas Republican’s seemingly tone-deaf comments.

It appears that Barton was literally dragged into a back room and ordered to retract his apology to BP by House GOP leaders, which, of course, ensured that people who hadn’t heard about the original brouhaha were informed of it. What would be really interesting, however, is to know how many GOP solons privately agreed with Barton’s original comments, and symphathize with BP’s plight as it is demonized by the socialist bully Barack Obama.

If, as appears likely, cap-and-trade legislation is not going to be enacted this year or any other time soon, it represents more than a setback for the Obama administration (or for the environment). It’s also another blow to the high concept of using market mechanisms rather than direct government control to address major public policy challenges.
Cap-and-trade was originally designed, after all, as an alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations, which is why it was once championed by Republicans, particularly during and after its successful use in reducing acid rain in the 1990s.
But as the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (with an exclamation point from Jonathan Chait) explained this week, Republicans have abandoned cap-and-trade just when it might be most useful, with some former advocates, ironically, embracing command-and-control:

[T]he great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.
Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.
What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.

Leonhardt clearly believes that the transparency of cap-and-trade when it comes to costs is its major political flaw. That’s definitely a factor, but I’d argue that something more fundamental is going on. Once Democrats embraced cap-and-trade, Republicans began retreating from it as a simple matter of politics. And this distancing effort has been immensely reinforced by the rightward trend in the GOP during the last few years, in which leaders who simply denied there was any climate change problem, and/or that government had any useful role to play on the issue, have been in the ascendancy. So “cap-and-tax” was demonized and essentially placed off limits for Republican politicians, to the point where those like Lindsay Graham and Dick Lugar who weren’t quite in the “denialist” camp found it easier to just support direct federal regulation.
We saw a similar dynamic play out on health reform, where a market-based managed competition model long supported by Republicans, and championed quite recently by Mitt Romney, became toxic the moment it was fully advanced by Barack Obama. And even as they savaged ObamaCare as “socialized medicine,” Republicans saw little irony in posing as last-ditch defenders of Medicare, a relic of an earlier Democratic drive for a government-run single-payer system.
On both health care and climate change, it’s not surprising that many progressives are impatient with Obama’s determination to promote market-based approaches that the supposed party of market-based policy, the GOP, will no longer support. But nobody should for a moment mistake the identity of the prime mover in shifting the political ground away from the once-promising “centrist” convergence on using market mechanisms to address public sector challenges. The GOP could have declared partial victory and celebrated the Democratic Party’s abandonment of big government solutions, and then fought it out over the details. Instead, Republicans have burned down every structure on the potential common ground that Americans seem to crave. They may be able to succeed for a while in opportunistically deploring the inability of Democrats to get anything done. But if and when Republicans regain power, they may well discover that the GOP policy arsenal has been emptied by their own hands.

As President Obama struggles though a host of problems, from the Gulf oil spill to the refusal of the Senate to support a new jobs bill or a cap-and-trade system, you can hear Republicans repeating a strange refrain that first became prominent in their rhetoric during the health reform fight: this president is arrogant and perhaps even tyrannical for trying to enact the policy agenda that he campaigned on in 2008 in the teeth of Republican and (in some cases) popular opposition.
Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has been particularly insistent on this line of argument, with “bully” being the latest unlikely epithet employed to attack this embattled president:

For somebody who seems detached from the details of policy and largely uninterested in legislative wrangling, Barack Obama sure does come across sometimes like a political bully. But this is not bullying some obstinate backbench legislator. Instead, this is bullying the American people. With health care reform, he basically told the country that he didn’t care what it thought. The fact that people opposed the bill was proof they didn’t know what they were talking about. Now, apparently, the evolving strategy on energy is the same. Don’t like cap-and-trade? That’s your problem, not his. Plan to vote out Democrats in favor of the idea? Like he cares. He’ll pass it anyway….
Instead of passing unpopular bills through questionable methods over the opposition of the people, maybe the President should get behind proposals that can actually sustain popular support.

Okay, fine, let’s say that Obama should ignore the fact that he was elected on a platform to do all these outrageous things that Jay Cost objects to, and go with the polls which make 2010 “likely voters” the arbiters of what he should do right now. What are those “proposals” the president should “get behind” that “can actually sustain popular support?”
Should he, as he has often been urged by Republicans, forget about “irrelevant” issues like health care costs or climate change and focus strictly on the economy? Let’s say he should; what, specifically, can he do that Republicans in Congress won’t fight tooth and nail? Best I can tell, the GOP’s “strategy” for improving the economy is to slash upper-end taxes while eliminating deficits and debts. This cannot, unfortunately, be done without radical reductions in defense spending Republicans do not, by and large, support, or alternatively, big changes in Social Security and Medicare that the public is certain to reject by much bigger margins than health reform or cap-and-trade.
The dirty little secret of Washington right now is that the policies Republicans would follow if they were running things are considerably less popular than those being promoted by Democrats, and as the events of the last year have graphically demonstrated, there is no “half-loaf” compromise approach on major issues that Obama can take that Republicans will accept. So Obama can do what he’s doing, or do nothing. If he’s a “bully” for rejecting complete inaction, then bully for him.

As we await the next step on energy legislation in the Senate, Ezra Klein makes an extremely important if fairly obvious point about the Obama administration’s apparent determination to get something passed even if it doesn’t include a cap-and-trade system or some equivalent carbon pricing mechanism. If the Senate won’t pass such provisions now, it won’t pass them later, either:

There’s nothing magic about [a House-Senate] conference that allows controversial policies that couldn’t pass the Senate the first time around to pass on the second go. The advantage of a conference report is that it can’t be amended, which means you might be able to sneak in some small concessions to the House that aren’t important enough for anyone to sink the whole bill over. But it can be filibustered. So if you add anything major to the bill that would’ve killed it on the pre-conference vote, it’s a good bet that it’ll kill it on the post-conference vote as well.
Carbon pricing almost certainly falls into that category. It’s not a side policy or a bit of pork. It’s the core of a climate bill. If it doesn’t pass in the original Senate bill, that’s because it can’t pass the Senate. Adding it in during conference won’t change that. It’ll just mean the conference report can’t pass the Senate, either. I can’t see any permutation of this in which a conference strategy for carbon pricing makes any sense.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that Congress can’t pass worthwhile energy legislation this year. But it’s not going to magically become a real climate change bill somewhere down the road, particularly with Republicans now monolithically opposing a cap-and-trade approach they once championed.
It’s fine to wheel and deal on legislation, but sometimes the only deal available is one that turns the wheel to an entirely different outcome. That’s probably where things are headed on energy this year.

In my preview of the president’s Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill, I ran through the many complex points he needed to make, and then sarcastically mentioned that he had twenty whole minutes to make them all.
Well, he didn’t quite use all twenty minutes, and while he made gestures in the direction of the many points he needed to make, he didn’t seal the deal on most of them. Most particularly, he was very vague about the responsibility of conservatives (most notably the Bush/Cheney administration) for encouraging reckless behavior by oil companies like BP; wasn’t very forthcoming about missteps his own administration might have made in the immediate wake of the disaster; and perfunctory about what he was asking Congress to do on climate change legislation.
In other words, it was one of those performances that probably just confirmed preexisting feelings about the president rather than changing any minds or creating any immediate challenges to his enemies. It did serve as a reminder that even on a bad night Barack Obama is ten times more articulate than his predecessor, but that’s a bar too low, just as the bar set for this particular speech was much too high.

It’s one thing to read the many polls showing Republicans with an advantage in the so-called “generic congressional ballot.” It’s another thing altogether to see that advantage reflected in data on specific congressional districts. That’s why the new NPR Battleground survey, jointly conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, is worth a worried look by Democrats.
This poll, as its name suggests, focuses on marginal House districts. Given the two consecutive pro-Democratic “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008, it’s not surprising that 60 of these 70 districts are currently held by Democrats. But as a group they are Republican-leaning (the likely voters polled overall gave a plurality to John McCain in 2008), in part because of their basic nature and in part because of a notable “enthusiasm gap” between voters of the two parties.
In any event, Republicans currently hold a 49-41 advantage in the “battleground” districts overall, and more alarmingly, a 47-42 advantage in the Democratic-held districts. Moreover, President Obama’s approval-disapproval ratio in the battleground districts is a terrible 40-54.
The “enthusiasm gap” strongly reinforces an already-strong upward skewing of the age demographics of likely voters. 38% of the respondents to this poll are over 60; only 9% are under 30.
Greenberg expressed hopes that this poll will convince Democrats from the White House on down to articulate a forward-looking economicthat sharply contrasts their values with those of Republicans:

“What I’m hoping that this poll brings about is that the Democrats are running with a much more effective economic message, which talks about who they fought for, and what they are engaged in now,” Greenberg said. “And that may also come out of the president’s speech this week, where I think as well he will be talking about not so much a grade for past performance but what he intends to do on energy and the Gulf.”

Developing and articulating that message won’t be easy. The NPR survey shows Republican messages on federal spending, the stimulus package, “bailouts,” and even financial regulation, as attracting majority support in the battleground districts.
It’s time to get deadly serious about giving potential Democratic voters good reasons to turn out and vote Democratic this November.

I wrote last week about the fouled-up legal and political situation in Alabama, where the third-place finisher in the June 1 Republican gubernatorial primary, Tim James, is trying to erase a 167-vote lead for Robert Bentley via a recount, despite an Attorney General’s ruling that challenges to primary results can’t be done until an actual nomination has been made–after the runoff in which James is trying to secure a spot!
So now James is plunging ahead with the recount–done county-by-county by Republican volunteers, with James picking up the tab–and Alabama Republican officials are trying to figure out what to do if he prevails, according to the Birmingham News:

At that point, James could contest the primary vote to the Republican Party senior state leadership. If the party found for James, then it would have to set a second runoff — this one between James and the winner of the Byrne-Bentley July 13 show­down.
That scenario is keeping Republican Party state Chairman Mike Hubbard from getting a good night’s sleep.
“It’s a potential mess,” said Hubbard. “All we can do at this point is follow what the attorney general says is the law and the rec­ommendations of the secre­tary of state and then see what we see. If the recount shows Bentley still in the lead, then I guess this is all over. If the recount shows James pulling ahead, then all I can say is, hold on.”
Bentley’s campaign man­ager, Bryan Sanders, crit­icized the recount but stopped short of saying Bentley planned any legal action to stop it.

So there’s every prospect for a good, mean intraparty political battle, perhaps drifting into litigation (always fun when it involves those trial-lawyer-hating Republicans), and then maybe culminating in a round-robin second runoff.
It’s got to make Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ronnie Sparks feel all warm and cuddly inside.

In his Oval Office address tonight, President Obama has a sadly familiar task: to apportion responsibility for errors he had little to do with without himself looking like a buck-passer, and to connect discrete events and policies to the bigger picture.
It’s reasonably clear by now that by sheer repetition, the claim that the president has fumbled the BP oil spill in some significant way has sunk into media and public perceptions. Some of this, of course, is coming from people who are lifelong cheerleaders for offshore oil drilling, and who idolize Dick Cheney, who is probably more responsible for the policies that enabled this disaster than anyone else. But presidents do get blamed for things they didn’t do, so appearing large and in charge in the present and future must accompany any Obama effort to assign responsibility for why this happened in the first place.
Aside from that difficult task, the president must also connect the dots between the disaster and the path he wants the country to take on energy policy. While it may seem obvious to some of us why a carbon cap or tax of some sort is an appropriate response to yet another calamity associated with fossil fuel production, it’s not at all obvious to the public generally. And this is the same public, moreover, that never much bought the president’s arguments that health care reform was essential to the country’s economic future. So while it might not be that hard for Obama to rally support for tougher regulation of offshore drilling, it will be a much heavier lift to connect the disaster to the need for climate change legislation.
Fortunately, Obama has a booming twenty minutes to pull off this complex task, all the while appearing as “presidential” as possible. He will have no time to waste.