You may be suffering when you fill up your gas tank, but Sarah Palin evidently has it far worse. Even “drill, baby, drill” isn’t good enough for her now that Democrats are talking about it.
President Barack Obama recently proposed lifting the longtime ban on oil drilling off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. This move could be a great asset to the United States moving forward since it will help alleviate our dependence on that dreaded foreign oil. While the environmental damage is pretty obvious, the economic benefit is apparently worth more to President Obama.
Many people are claiming this new policy is a way to woo Republicans into supporting new environmental policy, namely a “cap and trade” system. But if past experience and Sarah Palin are any indication, Obama is sorely mistaken that this concession will boost bipartisanship.
Palin has already blogged about how Obama’s oil drilling policy is really an anti-drilling policy in disguise. She claimed that it is “all talk and no real action” in a blog post for the National Review Online. New regulations and environmental policies will make drilling nearly impossible, she said. I’m sure if we had elected her vice president, such regulations never would have been a problem.
Regardless, Palin doesn’t think Obama’s approach to her pet project of oil drilling goes far enough towards her goals for her to even dignify it with an ounce of respect.
And that’s exactly why Democrats shouldn’t care if they pass legislation without a single Republican vote. Republicans probably wouldn’t even vote for their own policies as long as Obama proposed them.
Take a look at the health care reform. (Not really, though. You’d still be reading it by the time finals roll around.) Where are the reforms Obama talked about on the campaign trail? The exchange is there, kind of. Coverage for those with pre-existing conditions is there. The public option? Nowhere to be found. Beyond that, Obama spent a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about how he wouldn’t want a universal mandate for health insurance, even though Hillary Clinton strongly disagreed. If you remember the primaries, they were all about the public option versus the universal mandate, and we thought the public option had won.
Once Obama made it into office, he started turning into Clinton. Not just Hillary, though. His presidency has had more in common with Bill Clinton than Franklin Roosevelt. He hasn’t been transformative. There has not really been a New Deal, despite what you might hear from Glenn Beck. Obama was forced to back off on many planks of his campaign platform, due in part to political pressure and in part to economic necessity. His reforms have been modest, and his administration didn’t really do much through the first year. If the comparison to Roosevelt is pertinent, Obama’s “first 100 days” were more like 500.
Borrowing a page from former President Bill Clinton, Obama has enacted policies more in line with moderates than his left-wing supporters. This new oil policy is a perfect example of that.
If Obama were, as many people see him, a tree-hugging, baby-killing, America-hating Trotskyite, he probably would not have opened up our fragile coastlines to private oil companies without clear guarantees of environmental concessions from the right. This is a clear example of him trying to reach out to Republicans, trying to demonstrate that he is willing to reach across the aisle.
Instead of taking his hand, the right seems to be doing what it usually does. They’re continuing to accuse him of eschewing bipartisanship, despite evidence to the contrary. They’ll talk about the health care votes as an act of partisanship because no Republicans voted for it, but whose fault is that? Republicans’ complaints were listened to and considered, but they still never would have voted for it, so Democrats had no incentive to include them.
Talk of bipartisanship is nice, but it’s all useless if you’re rigging it. If Obama is willing to turn off his environmentalist allies in order to reach out to his enemies, those enemies had better listen.
Then again, maybe if Michelle Obama started taking Sasha and Malia to Washington Capitals games and the girls developed an interest in hockey, we wouldn’t have to hear Sarah Palin talk about being a “hockey mom” ever again.
Jonathan Reed is the opinions editor of The Crimson White. His column runs on Fridays.
