Yeah, yeah, we’re a week in. But Obama’s surgical rebuttal today of Hillary’s ‘false hopes’ line is going to take some beating:
“I have been teased and even derided for using the word ‘hope’. But we are America. We don’t need leaders telling us what we cannot do. We need leaders who can inspire us to achieve things. Did you hear JFK saying: ‘You know this moon thing, it looks too far’?”
Hal Weitzman is with Barack Obama in Iowa. Barack Obama loves ethanol.
When the last presidential caucus was held in 2004, Iowa produced 860m gallons of ethanol. A year later, after Washington introduced a renewable fuel standard mandating the yearly production of 7.5bn gallons by 2012, the industry enjoyed a growth spurt. Today, Iowa’s 28 plants are responsible for 2bn gallons of the US’s annual production of 7bn gallons, with 18 new plants expected to add 1.6bn gallons next year. As a result ethanol is one of the few issues on which there is near-consensus among the leading presidential hopefuls on both sides.
Go figure. As Weitzman continues,
Nationally, there is a growing chorus of disapproval against the ethanol industry. Foodmakers and retailers blame ethanol for higher corn prices. Livestock producers resent the effect of the corn boom on feed costs. Some environmentalists question ethanol’s green credentials and say there should be more support for wind and solar power. Free-market groups oppose a 51 cent-a-gallon government subsidy for refiners who blend ethanol into traditional petrol.
Regardless of this opposition, ethanol is likely to become a permanent fixture of the US’s energy supply, boosted by growing interest in renewable fuels and a widespread sentiment that the country needs to wean itself off its dependency on oil imports. Polls show most Americans support the industry. This month Congress passed an energy bill that mandates an increased annual production of 36bn gallons of ethanol by 2022. “It’s pretty easy to take a shot at ethanol, but the reality is that it’ll be a part of any ‘final package’ on energy,” says Wallace Tyner, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Grrr.
The Washington Post has helpfully published a comprehensive list of who is advising which Presidential candidates on foreign policy. Quite how policy coherence and/or a clear pecking order is supposed to be established with so many advisers (Clinton has 20, Obama 23) is anyone’s guess, but if it’s a case of ‘the more the merrier’, then there’s quite a party getting underway.
Among the Clinton highlights are Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Wes Clark, Richard Holbrooke, Michael O’Hanlon, Strobe Talbott and Joseph Wilson; the Obama camp, meanwhile, is home to Zbigniew Brzezinksi, Richard Clarke, Ivo Daalder, Tony Lake, Rob Malley, Susan Rice, Dennis Ross. (Incidentally, we hope that the latter lot are happy where they are. We have it on good authority that this time around, Team Clinton has put the word out that the usual process – whereby foreign policy advisers to other candidates are allowed to switch horses as and when their candidate gets eliminated during primary season – has been abolished, at least as far as Hillary as concerned. The ‘you’re with us or against us’ ethos is no longer limited to the GOP, it seems…)
What of the Republicans? It’s McCain who wins first prize for sheer surfeit of advice, with no less than 35 foreign policy advisers. Included in his gang, nay, army: Richard Armitage, Max Boot, Lawrence Eagleburger, Niall Ferguson, Alexander Haig, Robert Kagan, Henry Kissinger, William Kristol, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, George Schultz and James Woolsey. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, must surely win some sort of special achievement award for including Cofer Black on his team, who the rest of us will forever know affectionately as “the flies on the eyeball guy“.
All of which just leaves one burning question. Amid this extraordinary roster of expertise, how many women are included on each team? Well, bearing in mind that we may be a little out in cases where it’s not immediately clear what gender is implied by the forename in question, here’s our reckoning of the overall ranking:
It’s lucky that Team McCain has Robert Kagan on board to explain why they don’t need any women. Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus, remember?
Michael Tomasky has a thoughtful piece about Al Gore in the current New York Review of Books. He doesn’t reckon there’s much prospect of Gore running:
When the Democrats’ front-runners were Clinton and Edwards, the case for a Gore candidacy was more convincing; there was room for one more heavyweight. But Obama seems to have taken up much of the space that Gore could have occupied. When Gore’s name is tossed into polls, he still comes out third, usually well behind Clinton and Obama… Democratic voters tell pollsters they’re quite satisfied with the current candidates (more so than Republican voters are). And even though Democrats say they admire his recent work on climate change and obviously wish he’d been president for the last seven years, whether he has appeal to independents is an open question.
Well, of course we all admire Citizen Al’s principled stance on climate change. Don’t we? Well, actually no. The thing about Gore on climate change is that for all the PowerPoint presentations and sounding of planetary alarm bells, he offers practically no specificity about what should happen after Kyoto’s expiry in 2012. Why is he able to get away with that? Simple: none of the environmental groups offer any details either, so given the complexity of the subject, who’s going to point out that Gore’s emperor is wearing no clothes?
When Brown and Blair ran with Make Poverty History in 2005, they knew that a timetable for giving 0.7 per cent of national income to aid was a prerequisite for any kind of cover from the advocacy groups. Not so with the green NGOs: just look at the lamentable policy position of umbrella group Stop Climate Chaos, who mumble that governments should limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, but then – like Gore – fail to address any of the key points, such as that:
I tried to ask Gore about this during one of his vaunted presentations, at the Royal Society of Arts last year. Did he accept that stabilising the climate safely would entail a quantified ceiling, and that this would mean developing country targets; and if so, what thoughts did he have on what would constitute fair shares to the atmosphere? Gore blustered and blew, but nevertheless definitively ducked the question.
Not so with Angela Merkel. She may not have produced a zappy film, but credit where it’s due: she’s a lot further ahead on climate change than Al Gore.
Meanwhile, James Wolcott alerts us to lively goings-on at the snappily titled blog ‘John Cole’s Balloon Juice‘, where the combined intellectual might of the US blogosphere is still musing aloud about the (generally reckoned to be rubbish) CNN / YouTube question time for Democrat candidates.
More specifically, they’re wondering how the show might be improved upon if there were to be a Republican variant – and they’re busy dreaming up questions that hard-ass conservatives in the audience (or indeed sending in videos via YouTube) might put to their beloved GOP candidates. Now read on…