This WaPo article is a revealing look at how Barack Hussein Obama is willing to sell out key principles, campaign promises, and core constituencies for…
How politics spilled into policy
By Michael Leahy and Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Behind closed doors with his Democratic Senate colleagues, a frustrated Nelson was making no secret of his unhappiness with the administration’s deal making. Drilling advocates were getting concessions, while the climate-change bill appeared to be going nowhere. What sort of bargain was that? At a meeting on the bill in March, Nelson challenged Lindsey Graham.
Whose votes are you bringing with you? Nelson demanded.
“Only me,” Graham replied.
Nelson pressed him: You’re selling the gulf and you’re only getting yourself?
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who liked the idea of his state receiving royalties from drilling, stood in defense of Graham. “It isn’t just Lindsey Graham who wants offshore drilling,” Warner said, according to Graham and others who were there. “I’m a coastal-state Democrat, and I support drilling.”
On the day before Obama’s March 31 drilling announcement, Interior officials began calling influential Democrats to give them advance notice. Salazar left phone messages for some of his old Senate friends.
“I took care of you, Bobby,” he said in a voice mail to Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), an apparent reference to the plan’s protection of New Jersey’s coastal area.
But Menendez was still upset by Obama’s decision to open Mid-Atlantic zones to possible exploration. A spill off Virginia, for example, might spread north with potentially devastating consequences for New Jersey’s waters and tourism.
“You’ve lost a vote for climate change,” Menendez told Salazar in a return voice mail.
And Obama is still doing it and is doing it again today.
He has the trustworthiness of Richard Milhouse Nixon without any of the political acumen.
1 comments
Author