McCain and Climate

I have to agree that it's incredibly unhelpful to have Bill Clinton and Al Gore praising John McCain on climate change. It's true, in a sense, that McCain is better than your average Republican on this issue. But that was much more true a couple of years ago when he was cosponsoring the McCain-Lieberman climate change half-measures bill. These days, though, that bill, inadequate as it is, has become the Lieberman-Warner bill because McCain dropped his support for it.

If McCain's not even going to support the most conservative cap-and-trade bill in the mix, then what is his nominal support for cap-and-trade worth, exactly? It's hard to construct an appropriate analogy here, but if Barack Obama claimed to be "for" something, and yet opposed every concrete effort to make it happen, I doubt GOP eminences grises would be leaping forward to praise him.

Comments

Oh, I don't know about that Obama example. He claims to support state regulation of third trimester abortions, yet he voted against a bill that would guarantee babies medical care after they're born. And yet, Doug Kmiec still supports him and says he's thoughtful about the abortion question.
Would you rather have someone like McCain who agrees with you that warming is a real problem, and just supports a different solution to it, that the Democratic congress could work with, or would you rather have a real die-hard warming denialist?
I know you have to say bad things about McCain since his climate solution isn't as good as Obama's and you disagree with him on a lot of other stuff, but let's be realistic, any project as big as global warming will require bipartisan support to take action on. McCain's stance is a first step for the Republican party.

Posted by jamie | July 12, 2008 5:11 PM

Counterintuitive thinking: Bill Clinton praising McCain as an environmentalist will further depress McCain's hard-right base, thus reducing Republican turnout and helping Obama.

Maybe? Too bank-shot-y?

Posted by perhaps | July 12, 2008 5:18 PM

"I have to agree that it's incredibly unhelpful to have Bill Clinton and Al Gore praising John McCain on climate change"

And Matthew's entire political philosophy involves lying when the truth ain't "helpful".

It's why he was willing to spend the entire late Winter and Spring lying about Hillary Clinton so he could help bring about the most conservative Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter.

Yglesias thinks truth is optional in his writings. And that's why his writing is not "helpful", but is instead pestilent.

Posted by Petey | July 12, 2008 5:21 PM

Ice breaking up in winter!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25638651

>just supports a different solution to it

I.e., do nothing.

Petey, it must really suck to be so filled with bitterness. Seriously.

Posted by John McCain: More of the Same | July 12, 2008 5:56 PM

If not going out of your way to praise your opponent when you're trying to defeat him constitutes "lying," then call me a lying liar. Especially when the praise the opponent deserves is lukewarm at best.

Posted by tomemos | July 12, 2008 6:09 PM

Uh, Lieberman-Warner can't be the most conservative cap-and-trade bill in the mix when the only other bill proposed in the Senate (Bingaman-Specter last fall) is considerably less aggressive.

Posted by bottomofthe9th | July 12, 2008 6:51 PM

Petey never points to any actual lies told about Hillary Clinton by Matthew.

Occasionally, Petey will point to a post of Matthew's that pointed out that a significant number of Clinton voters in West Virginia admitted to being racists. Petey then lies and claims that Matthew accused all Clinton supporters of being racists. Petey is not to be trusted.

Posted by mad6798 | July 12, 2008 7:01 PM

Matthew, you have a point but it seems to me that the gravity of the situations we are facing as a nation and planet underscores the absolute necessity that we elect people at least sympathetic to those conditions. McCain's policy outlines are abysmal but at least he looks to be ever-so-slightly better than Bush on environmental issues.

Let's hope that Obama wins and we don't have to find out. Lately, I, like other progressive liberals, have been clutching at my chest in dismay with every lurching step that Obama takes to the center. At the same time, I finally understand that this is what it will take to win the White House. The stakes are so high that we can't afford to be total purists with the process.

I sure wish we could, but in a nation where the word "liberal" is spit out with the same vitriol as would be accorded to the words "scumbag" or even "pedophile" (!) we have to count every little blessing...

Posted by gmarie | July 12, 2008 7:40 PM

Matthew, you have a point but it seems to me that the gravity of the situations we are facing as a nation and planet underscores the absolute necessity that we elect people at least sympathetic to those conditions. McCain's policy outlines are abysmal but at least he looks to be ever-so-slightly better than Bush on environmental issues.

Let's hope that Obama wins and we don't have to find out. Lately, I, like other progressive liberals, have been clutching at my chest in dismay with every lurching step that Obama takes to the center. At the same time, I finally understand that this is what it will take to win the White House. The stakes are so high that we can't afford to be total purists with the process.

I sure wish we could, but in a nation where the word "liberal" is spit out with the same vitriol as would be accorded to the words "scumbag" or even "pedophile" (!) we have to count every little blessing...

Posted by gmarie | July 12, 2008 7:42 PM

Who the hell asked Bill Clinton to be fair to John McCain? It sure wasn't me. In fact, Clinton got my vote twice because he was a Democrat. It turned out that I, and a bunch of other people were a little bit fooled on that score.

So when Al Gore and Joe Lieberman asked for my vote because they were "Democrats", I declined. Did the Democratic party enjoy that experience?

Due to the nature of things there are compromises we need to make all the time. Being fair to McCain isn't one of them, and if it happens too often, I smell a rat.

Posted by serial catowner | July 12, 2008 8:18 PM

it's simple tactics. few people vote on environmental issues; many more will be voting on economics, and polls show that though people tend to support environmental regulation, they tend to believe it will negatively impact the economy, and therefore is a weakness for democrats, otherwise viewed as better on economic issues by most americans. by praising mccain, they're locking/baiting him into being the gop candidate of climate change, which doesn't give republicans any space to attack obama on evnironmental issues, but allows obama to continue hammering mccain on the economy. it's a strategic management of the campaign cycle; time spent on issue x is invariably time not spent on issue y, and therefore big debates on the environment leaves fewer days before november on which to push forward the democratic message on the economy.

Posted by Max B. | July 12, 2008 8:44 PM

McSame is pathetic on the environment now, as he has morphed into Bush III.

In fact McSame now comes off as a moron just like Bush; going back to around 2000, he used to come off as somewhat intelligent. Now he is thoroughly dumbed down and incompetent.

McSame cannot be trusted with the White House, period. And we've already had 8 years of a disaster, so we cannot afford 4 more.

Posted by cm | July 12, 2008 8:53 PM

So I tried clicking through the link to find out what Bill and Al actually said that was so praiseful of McCain, and chased through a series of links of people who told me that Bill and Al were awful for saying these things, but didn’t have any actual quotes. Eventually I got to a link to an April 2008 Washington Post article that wasn’t there anymore.


I find myself thinking this is one of these manufactured controversies designed to convince us that Clinton and Gore are just awful, awful people when they actually said something fairly benign.


If anybody’s up to chasing down the actual quotes, ideally a transcript of both sides of the conversation, please post a link. Until then, this sounds like the usual Clinton Rules nonsense.

Posted by NormInCO | July 12, 2008 9:25 PM

Hey everybody! John McCain is Teddy Roosevelt!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/us/politics/13mccain.html

Posted by El Cid | July 12, 2008 9:42 PM

FWIW, last week, Kudlow was posting on the Corner that McCain has actually abandoned cap and trade. After perusing a McCain policy paper and not seeing that phrase, he made a call:

"So I picked up the phone and dialed a senior McCain official to make sure these old eyes hadn’t missed it. Sure enough, on deep background, this senior McCain advisor told me I was correct: no cap-and-trade. In other words, this central-planning, regulatory, tax-and-spend disaster, which did not appear in Mac’s two recent speeches, has been eradicated entirely — even from the detailed policy document that hardly anybody will ever read."

Kudlow says McCain could resurrect it, but it would be in a different form, and for now, it's dead. It's Kudlow though, so, you know, grain of salt and all ...

Posted by Eric | July 13, 2008 12:02 AM

I guess none of you have accualy done any research on the whole global warming scam,because if you did you too would know it's a complete and utter farce.

Posted by Mark | July 13, 2008 2:14 PM

Well actually I think perhaps had the right take.

If I were a McCain strategist worried about keeping the base happy the last thing I would need is Al Gore praising McCain on global warming.

Because you might lose the anti-science/flat earth crowd. If McCain loses people like Mark it is all over but the whimpering.

Posted by Bruce Webb | July 13, 2008 3:18 PM

If I were a McCain strategist worried about keeping the base happy the last thing I would need is Al Gore praising McCain on global warming...

Posted by Bruce Webb

I think Bruce Webb is on to something here. We need to find the nightmare coalition of skeeeery ultra hated-by-the-right lib'ruls and assorted demons to whole-heartedly endorse John McCain, and how he'd be most likely to enact their policies.

I dunno -- Cindy Sheehan? Rev. Wright? Michael Moore? Hugo Chavez? I'd love to see Hugo Chavez exclaiming that John McCain could lead the USA to 21st century socialism!

Posted by El Cid | July 13, 2008 3:24 PM

And like Norm I am finding this kind of nebulous. Clinton seems to suggest in a recent ABC interview that McCain is better than other Republicans but that is pretty faint praise. Moreover he puts it into context of 1998 when McCain was in fact better on this.

The Gore thing seems to be more or less something Matt Stoller built out of thin gruel back in April and relying not on something Gore actual said but instead drawing from a comment by a spokesperson. I am not at all sure that a third party quote from three months ago is really dispositive of Gore's current position on McCain.

Frankly I just think Stoller kind of got a bug up his butt on this and is seeing patterns that just are not really there.

Posted by Bruce Webb | July 13, 2008 3:38 PM

El Cid can dial up the snark meter all he wants. The truth is that the biggest danger facing McCain is that the Republican base will decide that he is just pretending to be one of them, which is all the more dangerous because it is true. It is hard to know if Candidate McSame would actually BE President McSame except of course on the all important issues of Iraq/Iran where he looks to be positioning himself to be Pres. McInsane. But getting elected means convincing a big enough pool of wingnuts to go along with the program while not alienating independents.

McCain is walking a tightrope and the slightest push could cause him to fall.

After all there are lots of people out there who think the problem with Hagee was not that McCain associated himself with him, but that McCain repudiated him and by extention them. If you lose the Christianists because you are a lying adulteror and you lose the global warming denier crowd by actually admitting what most rational people understand and you have already lost movement conservatives on campaign reform the net result is to subtract out the entire Republican base. And that base has been taught to bristle at the very sound of the words 'Al Gore' or 'Jesse Jackson'. Praise from Al hurts McCain, criticism from Jesse helps Obama.

But in any event thinking that some backhanded compliment on a limited issue is somehow a big deal seems misguided on the part of either Matt.

Posted by Bruce Webb | July 13, 2008 3:56 PM