Crisis as opportunity

Real climate change legislation has no chance of passing the Senate before November (remember, a House version of the legislation passed, I believe, some time around the Mood Ring era). The Obama administration is under intense pressure to do something to help his beleaguered partisan colleagues facing brutal odds for re-election and this is not an issue guaranteed to do that...quite the opposite. Climate change denial is rising. Obama's poll numbers, while not sinking, are not. Congress talks jobs, jobs, jobs, while afraid to do anything for fear of Tea Party Deficit Backlash.

Meanwhile, images of underwater gushing oil sear, our "addiction" to oil, as a former president put it, continues unabated, and it's important to remember the response to Santa Barbara.

So what will he say tomorrow evening after making his fourth visit to post-Beyond Petroleum Gulf Coast? Will he use his first address from the Oval Office to lament the spills and the death of a way of life in the Gulf, then talk about new regs he will propose and demand Congress do something? Or will he really demand Congress do something and take real action on Climate Change and our dependence on oil? Marc Ambinder speculates.

If Obama went big, the political ramifications would be serious and unpredictable. The Senate and House campaign committees would plotz. He would face vociferous opposition from members of his own party; David Axelrod would have a call sheet 50 pages long from consultants who want to know whether he is out of his mind. These people want Obama to talk about jobs, and jobs only. Getting a climate bill would require both the power of presidential persuasion and a hefty amount of behind-the-scenes maneuvering. (Sherrod Brown would receive weekly phone calls from Rahm Emanuel asking him what it would take to get his vote.) There is no good political reason to go Big. (I tend to believe that the political repercussions of pressing for a climate bill would not be nearly as disadvantageous as one presumes; on the one hand, presidential approval ratings tend to influence the performance of a president's party; on the other, candidates now have a handy way to distance themselves from the president.)

But, at times, the President has different equities than members of his party. This is one of them. Figuring out how to solve this existential problem is on Obama's shoulders, not Congress's, really. Climate change denialism is rising, and no one on the President's level is fighting back. The chances of building a consensus for climate change legislation will not be helped by the addition of a few Republican senators. More vulnerable Democrats are up for re-election in 2012 than in 2010. If now isn't the right moment, there may never be a better one.

This is what Obama was elected for. No, I'm not one who assumed he would lead us to a new era of progressivity as he walked on water distributing loaves and, ironically, fishes. He's a pragmatic progressive who has effectively maneuvered through crisis after crisis, fixing and retooling a fucked up system broken by three decades of nearly uninterrupted neglect and incompetence. As with the financial meltdown he inherited, this is another crisis he has to take advantage of to remake how we think about oil dependence, the federal government's role in regulating dangerous industries, and how his administration is taking action and leading a nervous Congress to do what needs to be done now.