The President says he’ll drill, baby, drill. Dave Roberts tweets:
Under Dems, we’ve established that off[s]hore drilling is OK. Nuke subsidies are OK. Coal subsidies are OK. As yet, gotten NOTHING in exchange.
I suppose after the health care victory we have to give Obama the benefit of the doubt that he can still get climate legislation through congress. But from the cheap seats out here in Seattle, it sure looks like he gave the GOP everything they wanted on energy, with out them giving him a single thing in return.
Dunno. This one has Axelrod all over it. He’s just won over a certain (small) percentage of undecideds with health care, and now he’s reinforcing the perception of bi-partisanship with this.
Yeah, it sucks. But in practice the industry has already moved beyond offshore drilling to things like shale gas, even in just the last couple of years. Plus, the Russians are going to do it, which means that if we drill or not we’re going to see polar bears die in oil spills. Might as well throw a bone to the undecideds and watch the approval ratings go up.
It’s another Obama as ninja tactic. 6mos from now we’ll find out that handing over the keys to the store, to borrow from the headline’s analogy, was a way to guarantee every 4 year old gets to go to pre-school.
Regardless of how the tinfoil hat crowd likes to paint the POTUS, he’s a remarkably pragmatic-centrist guy. Frustrating perhaps to the Left when he does stuff like this, and maybe I’m being naive, but he very well might have decided the good outweighs the bad on this particular issue. Politically it neuters the common refrain of drilling with infants (sorry) while neutering the ad nauseum CW from the GOP/FNC of his “dangerous socialistic, Gov’t takeover tendencies”. Sure the negating is minimal with the hardcore base from the right, but they’re lost anyway, just like the Left is won anyway. This is 100% geared to the so-called independents and casual voters who have a hard time with the nuances of a clean energy future with regards to the economy, foreign policy and global warming, but can otherwise grasp the simple logic that US energy = less Middle East energy*.
*Not condoning this as a truth, just stating simplistic logic. Lest not forget that political ads run 30secs.
$0.02 deposited.
Fair enough, you both make good points. Kevin Drum had basically the same take:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/04/why-did-obama-decide-drill-baby