Another Unforced Error

Guess this news came too late to give President Obama a winning argument against the repugs:

Zandar:

We keep hearing from Republicans that "Obama regulations and high taxes are destroying America's small businesses and jobs!" and repeat it as a mantra, which largely goes unchallenged by the "liberal" media. When asked for proof, Republicans usually just go SHUT UP CUT TAXES NOW and cover their ears. McClatchy finally got around to asking small business owners if regulations and taxes were putting them out of business.

They said "no."

McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business.

Their response was surprising.

None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.

Fantastic news! That'll put an cork in the nonstop repug bitching about "burdesome regulations." Wait'll Obama starts bashing them with this ... um. Sigh.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers Guns and Money:

Obama’s decision to not implement stricter clean air standards might be the final blow to anyone who had hopes for him as an environmental president. While he campaigned on promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, he’s had to scale much of that back in the face of congressional opposition and Republican extremism.

This I can understand on some level–if you can’t get the votes, you can’t get the votes.

But the president’s greatest power on environmental issues is through the executive branch and working with regulatory agencies. We saw George W. Bush do this very effectively–he wanted to eviscerate environmental regulations and he did. But Obama has generally refused to go down this road. While I think most of us were encourage by the appointment of Stephen Chu as Secretary of Energy, his appointment of Ken Salazar as opposed to someone like Raul Grijalva as Secretary of the Interior was very disappointing. Salazar has always been friendly to the energy industry and we’ve seen his Department of the Interior follow that path. Obama has not been strong on rallying for the National Park Service (which provides jobs, good environmental management considering the number of visitors and a big place in Americans’ hearts). He hasn’t pushed much for wilderness or new protections for federal lands. He signed the wilderness bill in 2009, but that was drafted before he took office.

Like most other issues, Obama caved on clean energy pretty fast, opening up drilling off the Atlantic Coast, apparently thinking this would get petroleum companies behind his energy policy, which showed his typical naivete when it comes to how Washington works. He stopped deepwater drilling after last year’s oil spill but that’s on its way back to pre-spill heights with no real additional regulations to prevent future problems.

And now we see Obama opposing the rules on clean air developed by his own EPA, apparently because he buys into the idea that environmental regulations hurt the economy and cause unemployment, an assertion commonly repeated but without empirical evidence.

It’s all extremely discouraging. I mean, I’ll vote for the guy, but that’s about it. The alternative will be atrocious on environmental issues, but it’d be nice to see Obama flex some presidential muscle and put through behind the scenes what he can’t get done through Congress. Alas, no.

But it's even worse than that, as Steve Benen explains:

President Obama is going to deliver a big speech on the economy on Thursday, and in the weeks that follow, there will presumably be at least some talks between Democrats and Republicans about job-creating ideas. Democratic leaders, in both the White House and Congress, will be pushing for things like infrastructure investments, and Republicans will be pushing for measures like weakening/eliminating environmental regulations.

With this in mind, even if West Wing officials sincerely believed these ozone standards would be bad the job market, why not keep this realization close to their chest, and then trade it to Republicans in exchange for something else? Why not use the rules as a bargaining chip?

Because Barack Obama treats valuable bargaining chips as if they were covered with the Ebola virus: he throws them away as fast as he can.

Liberals use every tool in the toolbox, and when those don't work, liberals invent and build new tools. Whatever it takes, and whatever works. That's what built the Liberal Prosperity.