If you hadn’t guessed, I love looking at the arcane world of politics inside the Beltway and elsewhere. There’s a really readable article in this week’s “NY Times” magazine by the perspicacious Matt Bai. It’s about the politics of health care reform but you could transpose energy and climate change into what’s being said. There’s an awful lot of insight here in any event. Many of the key players, for instance, are the same: Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi in the House; Rahm Emanuel and Phil Schiliro, not to mention the President, in the White House; Harry Reid in the Senate, and the moderate Democrats in both houses of Congress. Bai talks about Bill (and Hillary) Clinton’s failure back in the early ’90s and how the Obama folks are playing it much differently, giving the Congress full ownership of health care. You could swap in the BTU tax and the Kyoto Protocol failures from the Clinton Administration and see how Obama and Co. are working things much differently now.
Rahm Emanuel tells part of the story. “‘First, if you go back and study mistakes in the White House, you find they get leadership-driven and they don’t reach beyond that.’ By ‘leadership-driven,’ Emanuel meant that previous White House teams tended to focus almost entirely on the handful of leaders of each caucus rather than on building relationships with individual members. ‘I mean, if I think of one thing that we did that was a mistake under President Clinton,’ he said, ‘it was that early on it was just too driven through a couple of committee chairmen.'” Obama and his team are clearly working the rank and file of each house, Democratic and Republican, on energy and climate change. Although the Republicans in the House have shown little but antipathy toward the Waxman-Markey bill, Mary Bono Mack being the only Energy & Commerce Republican to vote for it, it is hoped that the legislation will do somewhat better in the Senate, at least among relatively moderate Republicans.
As with health care, the President is going to have to do some good old-fashioned politicking on the Hill and marketing to the nation on energy and climate change legislation. See this today, also from the “NYT.”
Not incidentally, see also this from “The Hill” from last week – Speaker issues ultimatum on climate. (I do totally adore Nancy Pelosi.) Plus this, from “E&E,” on exactly what the critical players at Ways & Means and Agriculture are thinking.