Michael Barone: Losing Political Bets

When Obama was talking about coal on the campaign trail, Cong Boucher must have been in the same place with ear plugs as the West Virginia Junior Senator Rockefeller who has gone from Obama is the "president I waited for all my life" to "he's (Obama) beginning not to be believable to me"

One wonders where Sen. Rockefeller was during the campaign, when President Obama promised to "bankrupt" the coal industry as part of his proposed cap-and-trade policy. The theory was that burning coal caused carbon to be pumped into the air, which in turn caused global warming or climate change or something. That this policy would prove to be very inconvenient, to say the least, to coal miners West Virginia, among other places, seemed to have escaped Sen. Rockefeller during the campaign. Source: Associated Content

We would bet that a lot of people including elected officials in coal country who enthusiastically supported Obama are not happy now. During the campaign they thought what he was pandering to the environmentalists crowd on using nuclear energy and not coal and it was all rhetoric to win the election. Now the coal industry is finding out Obama wasn't pandering as this week he is pursuing a nuclear energy policy by pledging $8B in loan guarantees to build nuclear power plants.

Where does this leave West Virginia Democrats who couldn't wait for Obama to take office and institute his liberal policies? The best location we can think of is to the end of the employment line on November 2nd. The good news is that we were told last week since they are elected officials, they can get no employment benefits so after the first week in January 2011 we only have to pay their bloated pensions which are obscene and will be looked at another day.

Losing political bets
By: Michael BaroneSenior Political Analyst02/18/10 7:14 PM EST

The Washington Post has a story on Democratic Congressman Rick Boucher, first elected in 1982, who for the first time in years seems to be facing a difficult battle for reelection. He represents the 9th congressional district of Virginia, the far southwest corner of the state, which is part of what I have called the Jacksonian belt, where Barack Obama ran very poorly in 2008 in both the Democratic primaries and the general election. This is also a district whose economy is heavily dependent on coal. The Post reporter makes a lame effort to blame Obama’s weak showings and Boucher’s problems as racism, but Wise County—one of the coal counties which didn’t support Obama in 2008—voted 60%-40% for Douglas Wilder, America’s first black elected governor, in 1989. In contrast, Wise County voted 82%-16% for Hillary Clinton over Obama in February 2008 and 63%-35% for John McCain over Obama in November 2008. Wise County voters have problems not with black candidates generally, but with Barack Obama in particular.

And with politicians whose policies would damage the coal industry. That hurt a couple of longtime Democratic state legislators from the area, who lost their seats in the November 2009 Virginia state election. And it is threatening Boucher in the 9th. As the Post story noted, “Boucher's support for cap and trade was good for his district, he said, because he negotiated major concessions for the industry. And if Congress does not begin regulating carbon emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency will -- without those concessions, Boucher said. ‘On cap and trade, there is real misunderstanding on my role and what the bill was designed to do,’ he said.” Boucher was in a difficult position: as chairman of a subcommittee on the Energy and Commerce Committee, he must have felt great pressure to support the cap-and-trade bill co-sponsored by fellow E&C subcommittee chairman Edward Markey and full committee chairman Henry Waxman. If he won’t support their bills, how can he expect they will support his? And indeed he may have gotten something in the way of concessions from them. But Boucher was one of several politicians of both parties—Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist are others—who in the first half of 2009 placed political bets on the continuing popularity of Barack Obama and his programs. Those now appear to be losing bets, as Specter and Crist trail in the Pennsylvania and Florida Senate races and Boucher, as the Post reports, is in trouble in his quest for a 15th term in the House.

Read more from Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner