Winning the Post-Election Challenge #1
San Francisco -- Looking at the map of seats that changed hands on Tuesday, it struck me that the Republicans made their major gains in places that remain economically dependent on commodity or old-line industrial jobs. States like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Tennessee, and regions like rural upstate New York and southwestern Virginia.
In the new-economy centers -- Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, and most spectacularly California -- the Democrats held their own very strongly.
But it's vital to understand that the old-economy geographies where the Republicans did better are desperate to become new-economy dynamos. In mid-October the New York Times ran a story about a very successful effort to generate community support for saving energy -- in communities in Kansas, where neither climate change nor Al Gore has much brand value. The Kansas voters didn't reject, for example, clean energy. They were upset, though, because they felt that they were going to get stuck with the bill for paying more for their dirty-energy reliance, while coastal regions (or China) would get the clean energy jobs. As early as spring of 2009, in visits to states like Indiana, I heard real concern from solid, mainstream business leaders that Congressional climate legislation was likely to be tilted to the benefit of the coasts.
Poll after poll has shown that these same communities are seriously committed to building a new economy. In mid-September, a poll showed that two-thirds of likely voters favored requiring cars to get 60 mpg -- even if it raised the cost by $3,000! Voters in the most desperate economic regions of the country wanted more government support for clean energy. Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland closed out his campaign with an ad for clean energy -- because his polling showed it offered the best shot at the victory that in the end eluded him.
It's this sense of being left behind, which terrifies voters in the old-economy states, that threw Democrats out of office wholesale this week. In places where voters felt more confident that the new economy was actually coming to their neighborhoods, they voted for hope and to stay the course -- most spectacularly in California, where they turned down Prop 23 in a campaign that tested voter confidence in clean energy jobs vs. voter fears of losing jobs from more established industries. But the defeat of Prop. 23 in California was able to happen because the state is far enough along the path toward a clean-energy future that Californians could see that real, as opposed to potential, clean-energy jobs would be lost if Prop 23 were approved. The campaign against the initiative got a major boost in the final weeks before the election, when the Obama administration was able to announce the approval of a whole series of solar energy projects in the California deserts -- pictures of the projects and headlines announcing them figured prominently in anti-Prop 23 campaign materials.
And that's the key to winning the post-election challenge that clean-energy forces will now face from the re-energized coal and oil lobbies. Clearly voters in the states that "threw the rascals out" (and brought true rascals in) don't want massive federal spending on anything -- including green jobs. But they will support government programs that help private companies grow the market share and job potential of clean energy. What created clean energy jobs in California were state rules that guaranteed market access to energy innovators -- and federal loan guarantees that gave solar firms the ability to borrow money to build those power plants in the desert. We need to do that nationally.
At this point, the financial challenges of getting clean energy to scale are serious and urgent.
There won't be another round of major solar projects -- unless federal loan guarantees get extended.
Traditional auto-industry dependent states -- Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio -- were among the places where the Republicans did best. But although these states have bet their futures on the electric-car revolution, Congress has yet to pass even the simplest incentive programs to help that revolution happen here in the U.S.
The decision by the federal banking regulators to shut down local government-loan programs to finance energy retrofits of homes and offices came at the behest of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which didn't want competition. Most Republican members of Congress claim they hate those two mortgage giants. So can these Republicans be recruited to overturn Fannie and Freddie's interference in saving small businesses and homeowners money on their utility bills? It would be an interesting moment to see them vote against such reforms, which are pending on Congress right now.
Measures like this, measures that are concrete and focused on helping a specific innovation get to scale, will often be dismissed by economists and pundits as "the government trying to pick winners." Guess what? The public wants winners. They want the government to help more companies win in the green-energy space. What the public doesn't want is for the government to pick losers. And that's what they fear when they hear about expensive or abstract programs. Even though a program may indeed indirectly help create jobs, people want to see how it is directly connected to specific opportunities in their own communities.
Why is clean energy so central to the economic aspirations of heartland America? Because it underscores that the new economy can include manufacturing as well as services. Clean energy is the foundation for a reindustrialization of America that can create hope in places like Ohio. A wind turbine is a big piece of machinery that, to serve American electrical customers, must be erected in America. Most of the hostility that coal and oil industries have managed to generate against the idea of cap-and-trade was based on the perception that it sounded like yet another Wall Street maneuver -- it didn't have much to do with making something new.
The ease with which both political parties tapped into anxieties about China and outsourcing stems from the same reality. America cannot survive without manufacturing - but public policy and elite opinion for decades have underplayed this reality. But now the tide is shifting. High-tech entrepreneurs historically felt that as long as the innovation was taking place in America then where their products were actually made was less relevant. No longer. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove captured this most eloquently in a recent essay, "What it takes to make an American job -- before it's too late." But Grove is not alone.
Oil and coal, the Koch Brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, of course, paid for this election. They will expect to collect on their investment. They expect this Congress to do everything it can to block clean energy from getting traction in the states where it is not yet strong. But that's not what motivated voters in those states -- those voters want to be included in the future, not left behind. So the first essential strategy for the next six months is to offer Congress programs that will unequivocally and directly help bring green jobs to places that don't have them yet. These will be private-sector green jobs, but with government running the essential interference to make sure they can get access to energy and financial markets.
That will create a painful bind for those who owe their election to special-interest money. Will they help carry their voters into the future -- or be caught holding them back in the past?
