What's Next?
Washington, DC -- Now that the Florida primary is over, it's still not clear whom either party will nominate. It is clear how environmental issues are going to play out in both nomination fights -- but not yet in the general election. The two leading Republican contenders -- John McCain and Mitt Romney -- are bitterly contesting the global-warming issue. Romney is going after McCain for his leadership, saying that the McCain-Lieberman bill isn't Republican and isn't conservative. McCain ripostes, in effect, that Romney as Governor of Massachusetts was "for cap and trade before he was against it," citing Romney's early support for the Northeast Regional Governor's global-warming initiative before he later, perhaps considering his Presidential ambitions, withdrew from it. (The legislature later put Massachusetts back in.)
At first blush, this positioning is odd. Why isn't McCain proudly talking about his leadership, instead off just going after Romney's flip-flopping? And why isn't Romney making energy one of the issues he can use as a proof point for his own moderate history, instead of pretending that he is a reactionary like Senator Inhofe? After all, polls show overwhelming public support for action on global warming, and it's pretty clear that this issue, unlike taxes or abortion, is not a hot button for either wing of the Republican right.
The answer, I think, lies back in Michigan. Romney thinks he won Michigan by attacking McCain for his support of auto fuel-efficiency standards as being "bad for Detroit." He knows that, outside of Michigan, fuel-efficiency standards are wildly popular among voters of both parties, so he needs a new version of that attack piece, and has decided that McCain's support for cap and trade is the trick. McCain is fearful that Romney did in fact win Michigan on the economics of fuel efficiency, and that his strong suit against Romney is authenticity, not leadership.
It's hard to tell if they're right -- but in the narrow context of Republican primary voters they might be. The one segment of the American people that still remains skeptical about global warming is the strongly partisan Republicans. And that's because, on a complex issue like global warming, strong partisan voters take their cue from their political leaders, and the reactionary Republican establishment has spent the past decade blasting global warming as a liberal myth.
Michigan is revealing. More than 80 percent of the voters in that state -- including more than 80 percent of auto workers -- understand that better fuel-economy standards are actually good for the economics of the American automobile industry. And just yesterday Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm spent about a third of her State of the State address last night on alternative energy -- with some excellent sound bites.... "Any time you pick up a newspaper from here on out and see the terms "climate change" or "global warming," just think: "jobs for Michigan." But the results of the Michigan Republican primary suggest that Republican primary voters were heavily drawn from the 20 percent that disagrees.
In Florida, however, the biter was bit. Governor Crist has made global warming his signature issue. He was not expected to endorse in the primary, but in the last week he came out for McCain, and his endorsement was almost certainly responsible for McCain's victory last night. California is a big prize on February 5, along with New York, which no longer belongs to Rudolph Giuliani -- and the major Republican leaders in both states have also taken strong stands in favor of action on global warming. In New Jersey, another February 5 state, Republican leaders have also long taken the responsible view that climate change required action.
So McCain has a choice -- try to break away from Romney by placing global warming in the center of his claim to being a "leader, not a manager." Or continue his wooing of the remaining segment of the American public that is still skeptical on global warming -- the Inhofe wing of the Republican Party -- by making global warming part of his attack on Romney as inauthentic. Conventional wisdom suggests that, since independents can't vote in the Republican primaries in most of the February 5 states, McCain should tack right and use global warming to attack Romney, not to define himself.
Florida suggests that the conventional wisdom may be wrong.
On the Democratic side, with John Edwards, who first took the issue seriously, out the two remaining candidates have the opportunity to grab global warming as a defining leadership issue. Let's note first that the Democratic electorate demonstrated in South Carolina a tremendous intolerance for negative primary campaigning from Democratic candidates. Candidly, the negativity that became so controversial from the Clinton campaign was tepid and feel-good compared to the kind of slash-and-burn that is happening between the Republicans. But Democratic voters clearly thought it was over the top.
So if you have to go positive, as Obama and Clinton do, how do you create momentum, to avoid a brokered convention? With the economy tanking, the linkage between global warming, clean energy, and green jobs offers a big opportunity -- perhaps the largest unoccupied square on the chessboard. Edwards's departure frees up a block of job-oriented blue-collar voters. Both Clinton and Obama have made some use of the issue, but neither to date has focused on it for long enough or in a sustained enough way to take ownership and capitalize on it. They do a speech or two and run an ad, but since the media is choosing not to serve as an echo chamber, and since all the candidates seek that repeat validation, they tend to revert back to the issues that the political press wants to cover -- and global warming clearly is not on that short list.
At the moment, Senator Clinton has positioned herself best to own the issue. She's running green jobs and energy ads in California. Obama has nothing equivalent yet, although it is a part of his stump speech. But even her investment is not yet at a scale that will make the issue a defining one -- and both campaigns are unquestionably being influenced by the lethargy of the political press in covering what they do say about the issue. (Al Gore's and John Kerry's consultants also said during their campaigns that one reason they never talked about the environment was that when they did, the press wouldn't cover it.)
But here again, the conventional consultant advice may be wrong.
Because if McCain is the Republican nominee, the Democrats can be certain that he will tack back on global warming and energy, and try to position himself as the real leader on the issue, thus taking away one of the huge economic issues on which the Democratic nominee could go after him. And in the remaining primary states, both Democrats need a theme with national resonance, one that appeals to Edwards's blue-collar voting base, that projects a positive vision that doesn't require huge investments in retail politics -- which they can't afford.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So should politics. Energy, jobs, and climate are a powerful combination that is still waiting for some candidate to saddle up and ride to the White House.
