September 24, 2009
By Mike Allen & Jim Vandehei - POLITICO
Rather than a tough vote, this is actually helping members in some tough districts that [John] McCain carried,” Rivlin said. “Senators can look at these results and find that voting for a climate change bill is not as politically risky as the opposition would like to make it seem.”
What the poll cannot account for is the political fallout from a sustained public attack on the plan. In many ways, the cap-and-trade crowd owes health reform activists a hearty thanks, since they sucked up all the political oxygen and attention in August.
Imagine a month of town halls with people shouting about high energy bills and massive tax increases. Would the polls be the same after the combination of relentless ads and right-wing protests? Doubtful.
That is why it remains unlikely Congress will get energy legislation done this year and also why it will be harder than some expect next year.
Tony Kreindler, Environmental Defense Fund’s national media director for climate, called the three congressional districts in the poll “the hardest districts you can think of to test in.”
“In every case, the members came out in a very strong place politically,” he said. “The hard data say that even after two years of well-funded opposition campaigns, constituents aren’t buying what the opposition is selling.”
“We’re not in any way pushing to go before health care, or ram through the process,” Kreindler added. “We’re building toward a successful vote and working with the obvious reality that nothing will go before health care.”
One of the districts polled was the conservative swath of central Virginia represented by Perriello, a freshman, who told POLITICO that small-business owners and entrepreneurs see clean energy as a potential major growth area.
“Even people who don’t agree with me on policy recognize I work tons of hours every day to get these things fixed,” Perriello said. “People realize the problem of energy dependence and that both parties have yapped on without doing anything about it. They appreciate people stepping up.”
Still, Perriello faces opposition from groups such as the American Energy Alliance, which contends on its website that the legislation would impose a “national energy tax” and “mandate increased use of expensive, unreliable forms of power.”
Advocates of the legislation are pushing to pass a Senate energy and climate bill by the time the United Nations Summit on Climate Change convenes in Copenhagen in early December.
“We are here to turn up the heat on skeptics because doing nothing on clean energy and climate will turn up the heat on the rest of us,” said David Di Martino, chief executive officer of Blue Line Strategic Communications, which works for the war room.
President Barack Obama had been expected to attend the summit, but now that may depend on how health care goes.
Repower America activists organized by the Alliance for Climate Protection, founded by Gore in 2006, have sent 250,000 letters to members of Congress in the past few months and last week delivered about 50,000 to senators in their home states.
Over the summer, the group held a Made in America Jobs Tour that included 50 events in 22 states.
“It’s a serious battle, and we’re taking it on,” said Maggie Fox, the group’s chief executive officer.
“When a member walks in a parade and gets called a traitor, that’s a big deal. And so our job is not just to be on the ground in these states, which we’re doing, but to build intensity.”
“Our charge is actually to help those people all over the country who know we need to do this,” she added. “And it’s the next generation who provides us with a lot of that intensity: It is their issue, and they’re inheriting this world. They don’t want to hear that it’s inconvenient to deal with it. Our challenge is to give voice to them.”
The war room released a poll this month showing strong support in battleground states for a clean energy and climate policy.
Benenson Strategy Group, which polled for the Obama presidential campaign, previewed the message in a polling memo sent to Democratic allies: “Voters know that Big Oil and special interests have blocked energy reform for decades to protect their profits and that we’re sending billions of dollars to hostile foreign regimes, which hurts our economy, helps our enemies and puts our security at risk.”
Activists hope Obama will go to the Copenhagen summit, suggesting the United States would be in a much stronger position to show global leadership if he could say both the House and the Senate have passed tough bills — even if the legislation has not gone through a joint House-Senate conference committee and been signed into law.
“This administration has done a pretty remarkable job of lining up a bunch of administrative action to show they mean business on this in the absence of legislation,” Fox said.
“The world is looking for not just the administration’s shift but really a political shift in the country, which is measured through action in the House and the Senate,” she said. “When you accept the scope of this challenge, you want to step into it in a very aggressive way.”
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