Michael Tomasky: A President Adrift

[highplainsdem]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/02/barack-obama-a-president-adrift-after-jobs-report-and-epa-decision.html

More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term.

The smog decision is a real low. The story behind this includes the fact that, as Brad Plumer reports environmental groups were going to file a lawsuit in 2009 about Bush-era ozone rules, and the Obama administration told them, in effect, “Wait, don’t hassle us with a lawsuit, we’re going to propose stricter rules soon.” So the stricter rules were proposed, and the White House has now said, “Sorry, changed our mind.”

We can’t calculate yet how this will reverberate through the environmental world, but we can imagine. This is the kind of thing that sticks with people. A promise was made and broken. And you know how partisans say sometimes in anger that we’d have been better off with the other guy? They say it for effect and don’t actually mean it. But in this case, it’s literally true. Bush-proposed standards in 2008 were tougher than the 1997 standards under which companies will now operate. I doubt environmentalists will forget this one.

-snip-

I keep thinking back lately to that candidate and team I watched in 2008. The candidate really had his finger on something. The team almost never made a serious mistake. When a mistake did happen, they did a respectable job of digging their way out of it. They had some fight in them. Well, I’ve learned something new from these folks: Up until now, I’ve thought that running a strong presidential campaign is a sign that one can probably govern fairly well too. But there appears to be little correlation between the two.

-snip-

[Lorien]

1. The new smog rules would have CREATED American jobs

updating dirty power plants would have been a huge infrastructure project; just what the economy needs. Of course, it would have cut into fossil fuel's record profits, and the Koch brothers won't have that.

[WillyT]

2. K & R !!!

:hi:

:kick: