A year or so ago, I expressed my misgivings about the man on this board, and despite some major remaining doubts, particularly about the HCR which I feel will have a lot of devilish details and unintended consequences, the man is revealing himself to be a very rational and pragmatic person.
First his endorsement of nuclear energy and now this! I am popping the cork on some two-buck-chuck and celebrating! He has kept his promise to invest in green energy, yet he seems to realize that it is a very long term goal, and in the mean time, we need to develop all the domestic energy from traditional sources that we can. I couldn’t agree more!
And what an “up yours” to the tin-horn dictators from Venezuela to the Kremlin to the Persian Gulf. Actions speak louder than words and I think this man speaks softly and carries a big, um, stick. Yeah, stick. Huzzah to you, Mr. President! You may turn this mess around yet.
Am I misremembering, or did Bush run into a lot of opposition when he mentioned off-shore drilling? I mean, I know he did in Alaska, but I thought in general he got opposition.
It may actually be a good tactic. If the Republicans backtrack on the compromise, the Democrats can blame them for preventing offshore drilling. If it goes through, Democrats can be appeased by arguing that the clean/green benefits of the bill more than offset the drilling and will take energy in the correct long-term direction.
That’s just a thought that popped into my mind when reading this thread. It certainly may be way off base.
This is a bad move. I doubt very much Obama will receive any political capital from this attempt at preemptive compromise; he could never do enough to appease the current, irrationally enraged GOP. All he is doing is angering his base.
Well, he does package himself a ready-made counter to one of the opposition’s perennial rallying cries. I’ve always considered him a politician first, and a pragmatic one at that. I don’t agree with this particular part of his policy. However, in the scope of his larger energy policy, it works for me.
Obama is doing the right thing–governing from the middle. With the Republican party entranced by the siren’s call of the right wing crazies, Obama can position himself as the practical, very electable centrist. The left wing will not be happy, but the lessons taught by the Nader debacle shows what happens when they jump ship from the Democratic party.
Maybe it’s just a good idea. We are in the midst of a financial crisis. Drilling will open up domestic jobs, money will flow into Federal coffers, and we will stop sending so much money overseas to countries that oppress their own people (I’m looking at you Saudi Arabia, the South Africa of female apartheid). Let’s just use some of the money to continue to invest in green technology such as nuclear.
He’s not proposing drilling nearly enough for them. Of course, having an offshore rig within sight of every public beach in the US wouldn’t be enough for them, because Obama proposed it.
I think that this is a shrewd political move, provided that the drilling is inherently connected to the green investments, and not just a matter of “we promise we’ll cooperate on that later”. It’s still a lousy practical move. Offshore drilling isn’t something that can tide us over until better technologies come along, since it’ll take just as long to get up and running as the better technologies themselves. And even then, even if we don’t have the alternative technologies, it’d still be a negligible amount.
I’m sure the Florida tourism industry will be mollifed by these points when the first drilling accident turns white sands into tar sands and sends tourists home in droves.
This has got to be a calculated move to pad the healthcare backlash.
And if it works, more power to him. I said about 5 years ago that we should drill domestically and invest the boon in emerging technologies. Saudi Arabia, et al, are nasty bedfellows.
