Take a look at this info graphic and see if you can spot what is missing. If you said “coal” then congratulations. You read the headline above. Yes, apparently the Obama administration’s “All of the Above” approach to energy is in need of an asterisk: *except coal. But green energy is the future right? And the future is now! I mean how much does coal even constitute as a portion of energy consumption in America? This much. It’s no surprise that good old fashioned coal is omitted from Obama’s “everything” list. He announced as a candidate that he intended to bankrupt the coal industry and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has been more than happy to oblige . Between the EPA’s Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), Utility MACT rule, and cap-and-tax New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), an all out war on coal has been raging between the lifeblood of our economy and this administration. The EPA serving is serving as the administration’s very own Secret Police (that should get me some hate mail) bent on crucifying any opposition . And no amount of faulty research or projected job losses will get in their way. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) joint resolution of disapproval aimed at preventing implementation of the Utility MACT rule, which is scheduled for a June 12th vote. “The failure of the United States Senate to rein in the Obama-EPA is having a devastating impact on the pocketbooks of American families and threatens the jobs and livelihoods of millions of Americans,” Senator Inhofe warned. “Over the past year, more than a dozen Senate Democrats have claimed that they want to stop EPA’s destructive agenda, yet when the time comes, they hide behind alternative bills they know will never pass…Today the United States Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama’s war on affordable energy: I am introducing a legislative measure that will put a halt to the Obama-EPA’s Utility MACT rule – one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to his proposed cap-and-trade rules that failed to pass legislatively.” Interestingly, an administration that is constantly screaming about a lack of bi-partisanship in Washington, finds that once again, bi-partisanship exists only in opposition to his agenda. The CRA swing votes include the usual suspects – vulnerable Democrats who perpetually try to ride the line between appeasing the environmentalist left and distancing themselves from Obama’s unpopular policies as they face reelection. Interestingly, each comes from a state highly dependent on coal, including five from the top ten states in coal usage. 1. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) · Coal provides more than 85% of Ohio’s electricity · Ohio ranks 3rd in US coal usage · Coal accounts for more than 19,000 high-paying Ohio jobs and a combined payroll of more than $800 million dollars. 2. Jon Tester (D-MT) · Coal provides more than 62% of Montana’s electricity · Montana ranks 5th in US coal production · Minerals and non-metal mining accounts for more than 13,000 high-paying Montana jobs 3. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) · Coal provides more than 80% of Missouri’s electricity · Missouri ranks 6th in US coal use · Coal accounts for more than 4,600 high-paying Missouri jobs and a combined payroll of more than $160 million dollars 4. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) · Coal provides more than 60% of Michigan’s electricity · Michigan ranks 10th in US coal usage 5. Jim Webb (D-VA) · Coal provides more than 43% of Virginia’s electricity · Virginia ranks 13th in US coal production · Coal accounts for more than 31,600 high-paying Virginia jobs and a combined payroll of more than $1.4 billion dollars. 6. Bob Casey (D-PA) · Coal provides more than 52% of Pennsylvania’s electricity · Pennsylvania ranks 5th in US coal usage · Coal accounts for more than 49,100 high-paying Pennsylvania jobs and a combined payroll of more than $2.2 billion dollars 7. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) · Coal provides more than 62% of Tennessee’s electricity · Tennessee ranks 20th in US coal production · Coal accounts for more than 6,100 high-paying Tennessee jobs and a combined payroll of more than $220 million dollars. With a Senate map that could go either way based on 2-3 seats, Democrats are likely to face increasing pressure to distance themselves from the Obama EPA’s job-killing, price-raising energy policy, particularly in these coal-heavy states. West Virginia Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has already stated that Obama may not get his vote. “[The president] has apparently made it his mission to drive the backbone of West Virginia’s economy, coal and the energy industry, out of business…I do not believe that either candidate has a real understanding of what is important to West Virginia. As governor, I go to work every day to stand up for West Virginians and create jobs. As governor, I know that I must work hard every day to earn the trust and the votes of my constituents. Neither President Obama nor Governor Romney has earned my vote at this point.” Sen. Joe Manchin has made similar comments . “Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has done more than any other Democrat up for reelection this year to distance himself from President Obama, said he does not know if he will vote for Obama or presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney in November. ‘I’ll look at the options,’ Manchin said this week. The last three years “have made it pretty rough” for his state, he said.” Luckily, they have other options . Update: Yes, I realize the list includes “clean coal” but that’s little consolation to the traditional coal industry and it’s existing production plants.
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Coal? What Coal?
[Posted by Karl] Earlier today , I wrote that Team Obama had been AWOL on gay rights issues for campaign reasons. This afternoon, Pres. Obama officially “ evolved ” into a supporter of same-sex marriage during an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts: “I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Roberts, in an interview to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday. Excerpts of the interview will air tonight on ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer.” The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own. Well, that’s semi -evolved, anyway. I suppose it remains to be seen how progressives will embrace states’ rights. On Twitter (and elsewhere), a number of smart people have suggested that Obama benefitred from yet another distraction from the economy and the debt. Yet gay rights are a classic wedge issue that divides Obama’s prospective coalition, which would seem to be an unwelcome distraction for Democrats. Many have also suggested Obama found himself painted into a corner by comments from people like VP Joe Biden. Allahpundit provides a decent elaboration of this thinking: Looks like his strategy now is simply to get it over with ASAP and then let people forget about it over the next six months. Some key constituencies, like young voters, will cheer. Others, like black voters, might not be thrilled but given their overwhelming support for O the risk that he’ll lose many votes because of this is minimal. Meanwhile, Romney’s unlikely to make it an issue since it’d throw him off his core economic message. (See, e.g., Haley Barbour insisting yesterday that the gay-marriage chatter lately is a Democratic distraction .) All true enough, but I continue to think “The Decision” here is driven less by pressure from Sheriff Joe than by broader campaign considerations. Recall how Democrats think about the demographics : [Ruy] Teixeira, writing with John Halpin, argues in “ The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election ,” that in order to be re-elected, President Obama must keep his losses among white college graduates to the 4-point margin of 2008 (47-51). Why? Otherwise he will not be able to survive a repetition of 2010, when white working-class voters supported Republican House candidates by a record-setting margin of 63-33. Obama’s alternative path to victory, according to Teixeira and Halpin, would be to keep his losses among all white voters at the same level John Kerry did in 2004, when he lost them by 17 points, 58-41. This would be a step backwards for Obama, who lost among all whites in 2008 by only 12 points (55-43). Obama can afford to drop to Kerry’s white margins because, between 2008 and 2012, the pro-Democratic minority share of the electorate is expected to grow by two percentage points and the white share to decline by the same amount, reflecting the changing composition of the national electorate. What yesterday’s elections may have told Team Obama is that the bitter clingers out there are bitter enough to give 41% of the Democrat vote in West Virginia to a convicted felon and to ease a ban on same-sex marriage into the North Carolina constitution. They may have concluded that their energies are better spent targeting more socially liberal white college graduates in the suburbs of northern Virginia, Philadeplphia, Denver, etc. than wasting time on trying to persuade Rust Belt Jacksonians to pull the lever for Barack Obama again while (as Allahpundit suggests) considering discontent among socially conservative African-Americans an acceptable risk now. The establishment’s mockery of Obama’s unevolved position may have suggested to Team Obama that painting Mitt Romney as a right-wing extremist is made more difficult when the president shares Romney’s position on SSM. Obama’s hastily-arranged interview with Roberts suggests his campaign was prepared to let SSM drift off the news radar, until facts on the ground drove a public (but controlled) flip on the issue. –Karl
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Obama’s flip-flop on same sex marriage still driven by the campaign
[Posted by Karl] The right has had a lot of fun watching Pres. Obama, his administration, and his campaign contorting over the issue of same sex marriage. But there is a serious message beneath the laughter. The most powerful man in the world does not knowingly make a fool of himself (esp. against his presumed ideological leaning on the issue) without reason. He does not pass up big campaign donations by refusing to sign an executive order barring same sex discrimination by federal contractors without reason. Yesterday , I opined in passing that Obama was backing off in hopes of keeping North Carolina in the mix of battleground states where the GOP has to spend money. Others have suggested Obama’s concerns are bigger than that. The Hotline’s Josh Kraushaar suggested Obama’s gay rights kabuki is more about the Rust Belt than North Carolina and Virginia, asserting that Obama has a much better shot at winning white votes in the former region than the latter. Kraushaar tweeted this shows Obama is still playing for Ohio and Pennsylvania , casting doubt on the VA/NC model. He believes it shows that Obama’s path to reelection remains challenging , because it relies on getting votes from working-class whites who oppose same sex marriage. If Kraushaar is correct, he was understating Obama’s plight. That is the lesson of the otherwise funny candidacy of federal inmate Keith Judd , who racked up an impressive 41 percent of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia Democratic primary. The sort of Jacksonian, bitter clingers voting ABO in that state are also found in southwest Virginia, Western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio. Moreover, Sean Trende suspects Obama’s reluctance to back SSM relates to the African-American vote and the importance of black churches in getting to his 2008 turnout numbers. Trende suggests that if Blacks voted in composition and number at pre-2008 levels, Obama has little room for error. Given that Black voters overwhelmingly backed the SSM ban on the ballot in North Carolina , despite Obama’s token opposition and a vigorous campaign against it by the NAACP, Trende is likely on target here. Obama likely needs very strong Black turnout in the urban centers of states like Pennsylvania and Ohio (and perhaps Virginia and North Carolina) to balance projected losses among rural and working-class white voters in these states. In one sense , this is not news. But it gives needed perspective to the propaganda establishment outlets like TIME churn out about the confidence of Team Obama supposedly has in facing Mitt Romney. The media can write for months about how many paths to victory Obama has, and how few Romney has. But Team Obama is not campaigning that way. They are projecting confidence, while campaigning as though November will be a nail-biter. Team Romney would do well to follow that example. –Karl
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Why Team Obama dodges gay rights issues
1. An incarcerated felon got 40 percent of the vote against the sitting president of the United States in the West Virginia Democratic primary. Barack Obama has trouble in coal country. 2. There was huge turnout in Wisconsin’s barely contested Republican primary for governor. Democratic nominee Tom Barrett has his work cut out for him against Scott Walker. 3. Barrett’s opponent Kathleen Falk actually had stronger union support, but they are getting on board now. 4. Despite his recent success in state GOP conventions, Ron Paul didn’t do any better than Newt Gingrich in consolidating the remaining anti-Romney vote in last night’s primaries. He even fell into third place in West Virginia. But Paul didn’t do very much in any of those states either. His campaign continues to deemphasize primaries as Mitt Romney is starting to roll up landslide victories. 5. Gingrich nevertheless advises Romney to pursue Paul’s voters, tying them to the discontent seen in the European elections. 6. Pretty striking that Obama waits until the day after North Carolina’s Amendment One passes to contemplate — and these are still just rumors as I write this — coming out in support of same-sex marriage. 7. A lot of the people lamenting Richard Lugar’s defeat are treating bipartisanship as if it were an end in itself. TARP, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the Iraq war, and the country’s descent into debt were all in varying degrees bipartisan.
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Random Observations from Last Night’s Votes
The big news of the night is that Richard Mourdock absolutely eviscerated John Kerry and Vladimir Putin’s favorite Republican 60-40%, an unprecedented feat going up against a 35-year incumbent. On the other hand, it’s not surprising, and yet, it serves as a potent lesson for the Tea Party going forward. Richard Mourdock wasn’t always this inexorable juggernaut. He was way behind in the polls for most of the year. It wasn’t until he began to show a little promise that the Club for Growth jumped in and dropped $1.5 million into the race (Erick endorsed him a long time ago). Then, in a self-fulfilling cycle of winners and losers, Mourdock began to evince the image of a winner. It became cool to support Mourdock. At that point, the entire movement united behind him, as even some usual suspects who aren’t with us in other races jumped aboard the Mourdock ship. The more Mourdock looked like a winner the more people supported him. Thus, the margin of victory is not that surprising. We must learn a lesson from here. Yes, it takes a good candidate and a lot of money to win against establishment incumbents, and even challengers. But we won’t always have the luxury of waiting until the candidate is surging to jump in. In some races we must coalesce behind the conservative before he/she takes off, or else he will never take off. To that end, we have unfinished business to do. In North Carolina CD-8, the Cantor/establishment candidate, Richard Hudson, only won 32% against Scott Keadle’s 22%. There will be a runoff. Keep in mind that the other lesser candidates in the race, who garnered 45% of the vote in total, enjoyed a lot of Tea Party support. Many of their supporters should go to Keadle. However, he needs our help . Keadle will stand with the most conservative members of Congress and lead a coalition to challenge leadership when necessary. This is a guy who is worth as much support as a Senate candidate. In other good news, the North Carolina marriage amendment cruised to victory 61-39%. Yes, even one that bans gay civil unions. Don’t worry; it also bans father-son civil unions too, so I can’t form one with my 2-year old son who I love dearly. Some things in life just aren’t fair. Words and concepts have meaning, especially those that have been defined since the dawn of times. In NC-11, conservative Mark Meadows , who was involved with the marriage amendment, fell just short of the 40% needed to avoid a runoff. There are also other lessons to internalize here. In CD-2 and CD-6 Renee Ellmers and Howard Coble were kept to just 56% against no name candidates. In IN-8, mediocre incumbent Larry Bucshon was kept to 58% against his opponent who spent just $10,000. If we put up semi-viable candidates and work them hard, we can take out incumbents. But we can’t wait until the challenger is ahead. With that said, let’s look forward to # hatchnext . And there’s plenty of work to do with open seats and Democrat incumbents: Ted Cruz , Don Stenberg, Richard Mourdock , Mark Neumann , Josh Mandel , Clark Durant , and Jeff Flake . bonus election tidbits Keith Judd, a federal prisoner, garnered 41% of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia Democrat primary. That guy also won a number of counties. In the Wisconsin recall primaries, Scott Walker received as many votes as all the Democrat candidates combined, even though he had no competitive primary. That bodes well for us in the general recall election against Tom Barrett. Cross-posted from The Madison Project
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Victory in NC and IN, But There’s More to Do
