Tag Archives: 2012 election

Obama Drops Nuclear from Energy Segment of Convention Speech

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Delegates react to President Barack Obama’s speech during the closing night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. (Photo by Jared Soares for PBS NewsHour)

Compare and contrast.

When then-Senator Barack Obama took the stage in Denver four years ago to accept the nomination of the Democratic Party, he delivered what many saw as a powerful and pitch-perfect speech that contained an ambitious plan to correct course after eight years of President George W. Bush. But to this reporter, sitting amongst the cheering throngs at Mile High, one point hit a decidedly sour note.

In the section on energy, which began with the understanding that the country’s economy, security and energy futures are intertwined, Obama pledged to “end our dependence on oil from the Middle East” in ten years, and also spoke of investing $150 billion in renewable energy over that same decade. But then the Democratic nominee added this:

As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power.

And with that, at least from where I sat (politically more than physically), a soaring speech came crashing to the ground. Even four years ago, “tapping natural gas reserves” was an ominous gloss-over for dangerous drilling techniques and increased carbon emissions. “Clean coal” had already proven to be nothing better than a marketing laugh line, something the Senator from coal-producing Illinois had to say. And “find[ing] ways to safely harness nuclear power,” well, funny that, both because it, too, felt like campaign-trail noblesse oblige for some of Obama’s biggest contributors, and because it implied that a safe way to harness nuclear power was something that had not yet been found.

But there it was–what would eventually come to be known as “fracking,” plus the myth of “clean coal,” and a big nod to the moribund nuclear power industry. One, two, three strikes in Obama’s energy pitch.

Fast, uh, “forward” four years, move indoors and 2,000 miles east, and listen to what President Obama had to say about America’s energy future in his 2012 convention speech:

We’ve doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines, and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day, more than any administration in recent history. And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in the last two decades.

So, now you have a choice – between a strategy that reverses this progress, or one that builds on it. We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers. We’re offering a better path.

We’re offering a better path, a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where — where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet.

Yes, despite a concrete acknowledgement two minutes later that “climate change is not a hoax” and “droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke,” the president still brags of opening “millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years”–and then he promises to open more. And, yes, there is still a reference to the fool’s anthracite, “clean coal,” this time incongruously grouped with “wind and solar.” But notice what is not there–not in this section, not in the paragraph about the climate, not anywhere in the entire 38-minute speech.

President Obama no longer promises to “safely harness nuclear power”–that likely would have sounded like a cruel joke in a world now contaminated by the ongoing Fukushima disaster–but beyond that, he does not promise anything about nuclear power at all. There was no platitude, no carefully crafted signal to the industry that has subsidized much of Obama’s political career, no mention of nuclear power whatsoever.

That is not to say that the entire 2012 Democratic National Convention was a nuclear-free zone. A few hours before the president took the stage at the Time Warner Cable Arena, James Rogers, co-chair of the Charlotte host committee, and oh, by the way, CEO of Duke Energy, stepped to the lectern and endorsed Obama’s “all of the above” energy “strategy” (they keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means):

We need to work even harder toward a future of affordable, reliable and cleaner energy. That means we need to invest heavily in new zero-emission power sources, like new nuclear, wind and solar projects, as well as new technologies, like electric vehicles.

Well, if you are looking for a future of affordable, reliable and cleaner energy, you need look no further than nu–wait, what? If you are looking for those three features in an energy future, it is hard to imagine a worse option than the unsustainably expensive, chronically unreliable and dangerously dirty nuclear power plant. And, as has been discussed here many times, nuclear is not a zero-emission source, either. The massive carbon footprint of the nuclear fuel lifecycle rivals coal, and that doesn’t even consider the radioactive isotopes that facilities emit, even when they are not encountering one of their many “unusual events.”

But the CEO of the Charlotte-based energy giant probably has his eyes on a different prize. Rogers, who has been dogged by questions about a power grab after Duke’s merger with Progress Energy and his lackluster performance as fundraiser-in-chief for the DNC, sits atop a company that operates seven US nuclear power plants, and is partners in a plan to build two new AP1000 reactors in Cherokee County, South Carolina.

That last project, which is under active review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, awaiting a combined construction and operating license, is one of a small handful of proposed new nuclear facilities currently scrambling for financing. The South Carolina plant, along with a pair of reactors in Georgia, two slated for a different site in South Carolina, and possibly one more in Tennessee, represent what industry lobbyists like to call the “nuclear renaissance.”

But completion of any of the above is nowhere close to guaranteed, and even if some of these reactors are eventually built, none will be able to generate even one kilowatt of commercial power until years after President Obama completes his sought-after second term.

Which, if you really care about America’s energy future, is, of course, all for the better. As even James Rogers noted in his speech (and he gets props for this):

[W]e cannot lose sight of energy efficiency. Because the cleanest, most efficient power plant is the one we never have to build.

That Duke’s CEO thought to highlight efficiency is interesting. That President Obama, with his well-documented ties to the nuclear industry, chose not to even mention nuclear power is important.

In the wake of Fukushima, where hundreds of thousands of Japanese have been displaced, where tens of thousands are showing elevated radiation exposure, and where thousands of children have thyroid abnormalities, no one can be cavalier about promising a safe harnessing of the atom. And in a world where radioisotopes from the breached reactors continue to turn up in fish and farm products, not only across Japan, but across the northern hemisphere, no one can pretend this is someone else’s problem.

Obama and his campaign advisors know all this and more. They know that most industrialized democracies have chosen to shift away from nuclear since the start of the Japanese crisis. They know that populations that have been polled on the matter want to see nuclear power phased out. And they know that in a time of deficit hysteria, nuclear power plants are an economic sinkhole.

And so, on a night when the president was promised one of the largest audiences of his entire campaign, he and his team decided that 2012 was not a year to throw a bone to Obama’s nuclear backers. Obama, a consummate politician, made the decision that for his second shot at casting for the future, nuclear power is political deadweight.

This is not to say that the Obama administration has thoroughly abandoned nuclear as part of its energy plan, or even its kitchen-sink rhetoric. There is no shortage of well-researched analysis detailing where the president’s deeds have failed to match his words, and it will take more than a significant omission in one speech to turn around the federal government’s policy of protecting and propping up the nuclear industry.

But the fact remains that at a convention underwritten by the head of a large nuclear energy conglomerate, nuclear energy didn’t even rate head-of-state lip service. That in a country where the nuclear industry tries desperately to brand itself as an energy of the future, the president decided to, at least rhetorically, leave it in the past. And that in a time where apostles of the atom claim that there is a nuclear rebirth, Barack Obama decided, on one of his biggest nights, that nuclear power would be better left for dead.

Does the Netroots Care about Nuclear Power?

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Van Jones speaking to the faithful at this year’s Netroots Nation conference in Providence, RI – June 9, 2012.

On Thursday, June 7, as hundreds of online journalists and activists gathered in Providence, Rhode Island for the seventh annual Netroots Nation conference to discuss what were deemed the most pressing issues of the day, a smaller group made up of nuclear industry representatives and officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Department of Energy got together 400 miles south to discuss matters they thought even more urgent. While the attendees in the Ocean State were getting training on “how to navigate the action-packed schedule at Netroots Nation [and] survive on two hours sleep (and still be alert for a day of panels!),” owners of the nation’s aging nuclear facilities pursued doubling the length of new operating licenses, floating the possibility that reactors will be allowed to run into their 80th year–twice the original design life of most plants.

As bloggers, organizers, pundits and politicians were discovering the charms of the Beehive of Industry (yes, that is one of Providence’s nicknames), inspectors at Davis-Besse, the oft-discussed, always troubled nuclear power plant near Toledo, Ohio were reporting what they termed a “pinhole” leak releasing about a gallon of radioactive coolant every 10 minutes. The reactor had been shut down for refueling, maintenance and safety inspections, but was supposed to restart last week. . . before the leak was discovered in a pipe weld. (Though the reason behind the leak has yet to be determined, FirstEnergy, Davis-Besse’s owner, has now resumed the restart. . . without so much as a raised eyebrow from regulators.)

This incident at Davis-Besse comes not so very long after the Ohio primary, where the safety of the plant and trustworthiness of its owners and regulators was an issue in the race between two sitting Democratic members of Congress–Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur. Forced to run against each other because of redistricting, the plight of Davis-Besse became a defining issue between the two, with Kucinich calling for the plant to remain off-line until the cause of cracks in the containment structure was determined, while Kaptur affirmed her faith in FirstEnergy. Kaptur argued that the failing facility meant jobs for the struggling district–a district that was drawn to favor Kaptur’s old base–and in the end, beat Kucinich for the Democratic nod.

Following this latest breach in safety, Representative-for-another-six-months Kucinich has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Inspector General (PDF) for an investigation into the NRC’s lax supervision of Davis-Besse.

As the netroots community and representatives of organized labor pondered in Providence whither the union movement in the wake of the Wisconsin recall results, 250 actual union workers, locked out of their jobs at Massachusetts Pilgrim nuclear plant (a short drive from the Rhode Island Convention Center), some for as long as 10 weeks, were filing a five-point grievance with the National Labor Relations Board. The union accused Pilgrim’s operator, Entergy, of coercive and threatening behavior leading up to a June 2 vote on a new labor contract. The workers overwhelmingly rejected the contract a week after the NRC granted Entergy a 20-year license extension for the plant–and 10 days after Pilgrim had to scram because of reduced vacuum in the plant’s condenser.

That there would be problems at a plant where replacement workers have been complaining that they are being asked to do jobs outside their expertise hardly seems surprising. That an ongoing labor action, safety concerns and licensing fight happening just two counties away from Providence would not be an issue at the Netroots Nation convention is a bit more vexing.

While conventioneers in Providence listened to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman explain his relative lack of action on the foreclosure fraud crisis as somehow part of what he called a “transformational moment,” members of Pilgrim Watch, a citizen’s group opposed to the Massachusetts nuclear plant, were in court demanding that regulators do more to require post-Fukushima lessons learned be incorporated in required upgrades to Pilgrim’s GE Mark I boiling water reactor (the exact same design as those at Fukushima Daiichi). Activist groups have mounted similar (and additional) legal challenges to the relicensing of Vermont Yankee, another ancient Mark I reactor well into its break-down phase. And in New York, public activism mounts as the Indian Point reactors approach their relicensing hearing.

In fact, Friday, as Netroots Nation attendees wondered why there was a 90-minute gap in the midday schedule (word is conference organizers were hoping to bag the president or vice president as a lunchtime keynote, and the extra time was allotted for additional security. In case you missed it, the closest the conference got to any high-level White House official was a new campaign video, introduced on tape by Obama), the DC Court of Appeals handed down an important decision that could have broad implications for the future of domestic commercial nuclear power. A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was negligent in the way it evaluated plant safety because regulators assumed a solution to the country’s long-term radioactive waste storage crisis when none currently exists.

If you were watching your twitter feed, you might have caught this. If you were sitting in on any of Friday afternoon’s Netroots panels, this ruling probably didn’t come up.

Indeed, throughout the three-plus days of panels, training sessions, caucuses and keynotes, attendees quite likely heard no mention of nuclear power, its persistent threats to safety, its drastic drain on the budget, its onerous oppression of workers or its brazen gouging of rate-payers. For, while there were well over 100 panels, and dozens of other training sessions and caucuses, nothing on the schedule even made a passing attempt to address nuclear energy here in the United States or the ongoing (and growing) crisis of radioactive contamination from Fukushima spreading across the globe.

It would be one thing if this were purely fodder for wonks and science geeks, but as demonstrated above, and in over a year’s worth of columns, nuclear power touches on many (if not most) of the issues considered to be core concerns of the netroots movement. Corporate greed, captured government, worker rights, environmental justice, and a lazy legacy media–its all part and parcel of the nuclear narrative.

And it might not be worth a few precious hours of conference schedule if the fight against nuclear power and its acolytes were a lost cause, but in this post-Fukushima moment (and, yes, we are still in it), the country and the world stand at a crossroads. While the US government seems hell-bent on backstopping a failing, flailing industry, other countries are using this crisis to step back from the next potential nuclear nightmare and commit to a cleaner, renewable energy future. Meanwhile, here in the United States, engaged communities of activists and concerned citizens are organizing to fight on the local level for the protections their federal government has failed to deliver.

The appeals court decision on Friday is a monument, really, to the years of hard work put in by individuals and organizations across the country–and it is a monumental opportunity to learn from this success and build the future of the anti-nuclear movement.

It is a movement that could benefit greatly from the online organizing tools that have breathed so much life into the netroots, but the netroots, too, could learn a few things from the anti-nuclear movement. Providence, with its physical proximity to Pilgrim, and its temporal proximity to so many developments on the nuclear front, would have seemed like a golden opportunity. But the organizers of Netroots Nation appeared to have other priorities.

While the good folks at NIRS–the Nuclear Information and Resource Service–where awarded a booth in the exhibition hall at the Providence convention center, veterans of the conference know there is quite a different level of engagement when it comes to the booths, versus what happens at panels and speeches. (This is to take nothing away from NIRS, which had a table filled with great information, much of which can also be found on their website.)

Fired up?

Some noise was made, quite publicly, as a matter of fact, about this year’s Netroots convention being friendlier to the Obama administration. “I think people are generally on board [with Obama’s reelection effort],” said Raven Brooks, the executive director of Netroots, as he explained to Talking Points Memo that this year’s convention would be relatively free of the confrontation that met White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer at the 2011 conference.

“People are fired up about 2012,” said Mary Rickles, who is communications director for Netroots, noting in the same TPM article that she expected an administration presence at this year’s conference. (Again, unless you count Schneiderman, there was none.)

Inside the convention center, Van Jones–briefly part of the Obama administration until driven out by a rightwing witch-hunt, and cofounder of Rebuild the Dream–headlined the last night of speeches. Jones, himself a longtime advocate for renewable energy, instead turned to a theme he has hit often in recent years: that while some might be disappointed with the pace of progress, in the end, it is not Obama’s failing, it is ours. But this time, it being an election year, and everyone thusly “fired up,” Jones put it this way: “We have two tasks: to re-elect the president and re-energize the movement to hold the president accountable.”

Quoting Jones in an email announcing next year’s convention, Brooks underscored the point:

After November has come and gone, our job of pushing for the strongest possible progressive policies will begin in earnest. In short, we’ve got to step up our game.

Inspiring thoughts, perhaps, but ones completely contrary to the way electoral politics has worked in this country about as far back as anyone can remember. Making demands of office-seekers after you’ve pledged your vote is not just cart-before-the-horse, it’s asinine and ass-backwards.

The netroots played a roll in the election of Barack Obama in 2008, though in the eyes of the now-POTUS, not an overly large one. After the election, Team Obama moved quickly to rein in the less-predictable elements of its grassroots campaign while one-by-one riding roughshod over most of the issues that mattered to left-leaning bloggers and online activists. Previous NetNat attendees had a right to boo Obama surrogates, and the folks charged with re-electing the president should be taught to fear that wrath–if not through activism, at least by way of apathy.

Mitt Romney would no doubt make a dismal president–but that is not the point. This election will be decided by turnout, and the Obama campaign will need to motivate parts of his base such as the netroots with reasons to get out and vote for his second term. If online activists want something from Obama in return for going to the polls, the time to demand that, the time to get that on paper–or in pixels–is before election day, not after.

After, Obama doesn’t need you anymore. It’s called a lame duck term for many reasons, but one of them is that the president can easily duck any kind of obligation some might feel he should have to his blandly loyal netizens.

Which brings us back to nuclear power and Netroots Nation. It is not a secret that one of Obama’s great benefactors in past elections has been Exelon, the nuclear giant that not only gave heavily to the 2008 campaign, but once employed both former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, once a senior Obama advisor and now Communications Director for his 2012 campaign. Obama’s steadfast support for nuclear power–making the point, not once, but twice, in the first weeks after the Fukushima crisis began, to publicly assure that the US commitment to nuclear was strong–now puts him at odds with many countries in the industrialized world, but, more important here, it has always put him at odds with many in the online progressive community. It would be sad to think that conference organizers decided against any anti-nuclear content in an effort to keep this year’s Netroots Nation “onboard” with and “fired up” about a possible administration presence.

But it would be even sadder to think that the fault lies not in these self-anointed stars, but in ourselves. While chances are if you are reading this you have at least some degree of interest in nuclear issues, is it possible that what once was called the “blogosphere” (but now should be considered something more) does not see nuclear power, the looming environmental catastrophe and financial sinkhole it presents, as relevant? Is it that the almighty and always invisible atom is just not as juicy as, say, fracking, or anything with the word “occupy” in it?

That would be a shame–and a mistake–for it is all part of a piece. The work of occupiers across this country over the last year is to be applauded, but some of the things central to the protests, a broken system, a captured government filthy with corporate cash, are central to the fight against nuclear power, as well. And while hydrofracking represents a tremendous threat to our water supply and our climate, and so should be protested full bore, its current profitability might make it less sensitive to activism than nuclear power at this point in its history.

Without government support–without the federal loan guarantees, the Price-Anderson indemnity, state and local tax breaks and rate subsidies–the commercial nuclear power industry would collapse. There would be few demands for license renewals because few plants would turn a profit.

And without a government-run long-term waste repository, the nuclear industry faces even more safety and financial concerns. The lack of storage options is actually a crisis for nuclear operators–and a threat to the safety of a majority of Americans. What this country does with its atomic waste has always been a political issue, too–and it has played out on the political stage throughout this past year. It is an issue that is very sensitive to old-time, easy to grasp, electoral politics, and so it is one sensitive to the newfangled tools of internet organizing.

So, between environmentalists and budget wonks, between regulatory hawks and electoral junkies, and between old-line environmental activists and 21st Century online organizers there is much to discuss. Let’s hope that no matter who is running for whatever office next year, the netroots, and the Netroots Nation conference, find the time and space–and the political will–to engage the dirty, dangerous and expensive threat of nuclear power.

*  *  *

[Full disclosure: I had submitted a panel proposal for the 2012 Netroots Nation conference, and though it was given consideration and, I am told, was in the running till the end, it was not included in the final schedule. The panel was to be called “Clean, Safe, and Too Cheap to Meter? Countering Nuclear’s Lies in a Post-Fukushima Landscape,” and while I was disappointed at not having this opportunity, the far bigger concern for me was that conference organizers chose not to include any sessions on nuclear issues at all. One year’s personal slight is not really a big deal; ignoring the obvious and broad importance of this topic, however, signals a bigger problem.]

The Thing That Couldn’t Die: Yucca Battle Continues in Congress and in the Courts

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(low resolution movie poster reproduction via wikipedia)

In the 1958 cult horror classic The Thing That Couldn’t Die, a young lass out water-witching (of all things) discovers a curious and ancient box–one that, whether you follow the conventions of the genre or the entreaties of the film’s internal expert, should obviously remain closed.

But, as these things are wont to go, greed and ambition get the better of a few mere mortals, and the box is breached, revealing the intact–and living!–head of a sorcerer executed hundreds of years earlier. The wayward wizard then uses his telepathic powers to manipulate some of the more foolish, godless humans to unearth the rest of his body so that it might be reunited with the head and realize the full force of its destructive powers.

It is hard not to think of this black and white bubbe meise while reviewing the most recent chapters in the battle over the future of the partially excavated, purportedly moribund Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in southwestern Nevada.

As noted here last month, the life and death of the Yucca project was at the center of a public face off between President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who just happens to hail from–and represent–the Silver State. Although the administration has sided with Reid on cancelling work on Yucca Mountain, Obama’s move to re-appoint Kristine Svinicki to another term on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission–over the vocal objections of the Majority Leader–registered with Yucca watchers like stirrings from the grave. Svinicki, after all, has been a staunch proponent of the Yucca project since she worked at the Department of Energy. . . writing the support documents for the Yucca nuclear waste repository. This week’s official re-nomination of Svinicki by the White House seems to say that rumors of Yucca’s demise are somewhat exaggerated.

Or at least that is what the nuclear industry and its army of lobbyists, captured regulators, and purchased politicians would have you believe.

As Republican members of Congress try to exert pressure on Reid and Senator Barbara Boxer (whose committee has jurisdiction over the NRC) to quickly confirm Svinicki, two states with heaping helpings of nuclear waste have gone to court to make sure that the Yucca repository is kept, if not on track, at least on life support.

Last week, lawyers for South Carolina and Washington State went before a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, arguing that while the government hadn’t allocated any more money for Yucca, there was still some money in the project’s budget, and even though it wasn’t going to get anything anywhere close to finished, the NRC and the Department of Energy were obligated to spend it. Congress had, after all, passed measures designating Nevada as the future home of the country’s high-level radioactive waste, and the law is the law.

The government, in turn, has argued that not only would it be throwing “good money after bad,” since the DoE has withdrawn the licensing request for Yucca Mountain and the White House has not put any funding for completing the facility in the next budget, the roughly $10 million remaining would not be enough to again wrap up the project when no more money is allocated.

The leftover $10 million, it should be noted, is not only a drop in the bucket when compared with the $90 billion projected cost of developing Yucca Mountain or the $10 billion already spent, it is only half the $20 million it cost to fund the project each month it was active.

As previously examined, the nuclear industry desperately needs Yucca Mountain, or some answer to long-term waste storage, if it ever hopes to expand, or, realistically, even continue to operate its existing fleet of antique reactors. Current moves reveal the strategy of atomic energy advocates to try to keep Yucca alive, however tenuously, in expectation that the political climate might change enough to revivify the cash-hungry corpse that is not just the Nevada dump, but the entire US nuclear power industry.

House Republicans–and some Democrats, too–are playing their part. In April, a majority of the House Appropriations Committee concluded that the Obama administration’s moves to shutter Yucca were “counter to the law,” and then they put your money where their mouths were:

The committee bill [provides] DOE with $25 million to work on a solution to storing commercial nuclear waste, but only if it is directed at Yucca Mountain. Also, the bill would bar DOE from spending any funds to eliminate the option of Yucca Mountain as a waste site.

So, you’re saying you want the radioactive waste to go where now?

Interesting little side note: the Appropriations Committee is chaired by Hal Rogers of Kentucky, the state that is home to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, the nation’s only operating uranium enrichment facility providing fuel for commercial nuclear reactors (oh, and a contaminated, toxic mess). And the Ranking Democrat on the committee (who also supported the Yucca provision) is Norm Dicks, whose great state of Washington is a litigant in the Yucca Mountain lawsuit (described above) and the address of Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States.

The Senate, as those who have read this far might have guessed, has a different take on the Yucca line item. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s Energy and Water Development Subcommittee didn’t include Yucca Mountain in its appropriations bill. Instead, Feinstein’s language directs the DoE to explore moving nuclear waste to temporary, aboveground storage sites.

Of course, the porous, dank Yucca repository and unstable, vulnerable aboveground casks are both unsuitable solutions to the existing and long-term high-level radioactive waste storage crisis, but with the House in GOP hands and the Senate under Democratic control, the assumption might be that neither option will ever come to fruition. And the assumption might be that the story ends there.

But it doesn’t. Not even temporarily.

Again, the so-called “nuclear renaissance” depends on a place to move the tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste generated every year. The way it is stored now is expensive, the way it is stored now is dangerous, and, perhaps most urgent to the industry, the way it is stored now is pretty much full. Something has to give.

While some states hit the courts and the House moves to restart Yucca, the president has picked a fight with Harry Reid on what is generally recognized as the Senator’s signature issue. And House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R CA-49, a district that includes the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) continues to fan the flames under Gregory Jaczko, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman who was once a Reid staffer and has sided with the Senator and the White House (at least as its position was delineated prior to last month) in the battle to close Yucca Mountain.

Should attempts to unseat Jaczko succeed, he will almost certainly be replaced by a commissioner more friendly to the industry and, thus, to the Yucca site. Should the Democrats lose control of the Senate in November, Reid will lose his Majority Leader post, and with that will go the power to control the budget and the fate of Yucca Mountain. But even if the Democrats hold on to a Senate majority, Reid’s position as its leader is not guaranteed, and Obama’s willingness to challenge him on the Svinicki nomination underscores that uncertainty.

And without Reid in power, there is serious question as to how long president Obama would stand by Reid’s protégé Jaczko.

And there is yet another wrinkle–there is actually a second pot of money set aside for development of a radioactive waste storage facility. It is money collected by the nuclear industry in the form of surcharges on electricity consumers’ utility bills. It is estimated to now total about $21 billion (or maybe as high as $29 billion)–again, not enough to finish building the Yucca repository, but more than enough to keep hope alive, as they say.

But if Yucca is not going to be built, then state regulators, in a lawsuit separate from the one previously described, say that the government should stop collecting the surcharge. And Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has introduced legislation to give back to nuclear energy consumers most of the money collected.

It shapes up as a potential win-win for the nuclear industry. On the one hand, it is one more pressure point on the federal government to, shall we say, shit on Nevada or get off the pot–to restart Yucca or lose a good chunk of money needed for any permanent waste facility. On the other hand, if money is refunded, and if future surcharges are cancelled, it is another way to artificially deflate the price of electricity generated by nuclear plants, and another way to hide the true cost of nuclear power.

Hiding the true cost of nuclear power is, of course, essential to perpetuating the myth of a nuclear renaissance–in fact, it is essential to sustaining the industry as it limps along now. The price of long-term high-level waste storage is but one part of the equation–one part almost always ignored by nuclear adherents–but it is a crucial one. The cost of storing waste at the various nuclear power plants is not only noticeable to the industry’s fragile bottom line, the potential dangers inherent in on-site storage are problems plant operators would rather belonged to someone else.

Yucca Mountain would seem the easiest prescription for this headache. One could say the industry needs Yucca to sustain its influence the way the evil sorcerer head needed a body to fully exercise its powers. But unlike the case of the torso-less thaumaturge (spoiler alert!), nuclear waste does not disintegrate when it comes in contact with a crucifix. The roughly 300,000 tons of high-level radioactive garbage that lies scattered across the US will remain deadly dangerous for at least another 100 millennia–and each operating nuclear plant adds to that terrifying total by about 20 tons each year. Without a government-funded waste repository, nuclear power simply could not continue to live–and that is why, to the nuclear industry, Yucca Mountain is something that cannot die.

The Making of an Evolution: Obama “Comes Out” for Marriage Equality

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(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Excuse me while I channel my inner Paul Harvey. . .

So, it was weekend before the North Carolina primary–a ballot that includes the searingly homophobic Amendment 1, a measure that takes the state’s already-on-the-books “preservation of marriage” law and tattoos it on the North Carolina Constitution–and everyone knew what was about to happen. Both polling and precedent said Amendment 1 was on its way to a solid victory–what’s a White House to do?

Conveniently, the Obama Administration has this guy on staff; his name is Biden. Joe Biden.

Appearing on Sunday with NBC’s David Gregory, Vice President Biden let it out that he is “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage, and the predictable media tempest followed. “There goes Joe,” or something like that ran through the reportage across the political spectrum, and “boy, does this put the President in a tough place.” It was classic bright, shiny-thing journalism–underlying issues and other big news of the weekend be damned, we have mouth-runner Joe and a contentious social issue; win-win!

Then comes Tuesday, and once again, putting minority rights up to majority vote proves a lesson on the reason we have Constitutional rights in the first place. North Carolina voters still hate “teh gay.”

Wait, what’s that you say? The Democratic National Convention is scheduled for North Carolina later this summer? Dems had already pissed off labor unions by choosing a “right to work” state for President Obama’s re-nomination party–but the unions, doing what they seem to do these days, made a little noise, then mostly fell back in line and pledged to support the Democrats in the fall. Gay rights organizations, however, have proven a little more savvy and played a little more hardball with their support–and most notably, their financial support–during Obama’s first term.

It was not a surprise, then, that those on left-leaning email lists awoke today to find petitions in their mailboxes calling for the Democrats to pull their convention from Charlotte in protest (I think the Variety hed would read: “D R&F to DNC: Pull DNC from NC, ASAP”). This was probably extra irritating for some in the White House–uh, make that in Chicago, where Obama’s reelection team is based–because there is a big fundraising gala scheduled this week in New York City, hosted by Ricky Martin and put on by the LGBT Leadership Council, Obama for America, and the Futuro Fund.

Then came the political bombshell–OK, maybe a firecracker: in a “hastily arranged” (so the story goes) interview with ABC news, President Barack Obama, famous till now for his position on marriage equality not having evolved enough to endorse it, tells a waiting nation that he now personally believes in the right of same-sex couples to marry. He had wanted to take more time before announcing this, we are told, but events–named Joe–had sped up the timetable.

Yeah, that’s what happened.

Now, it should be noted that Obama made the distinction between personally supporting marriage equality, while still saying individual states should make decisions for their populations–hardly a crusading vanguard position in the civil rights community–but it is not without some meaning for the President of the United States to speak up on this issue. (And on a personal note, I consider marriage to be such low-hanging fruit in the battle for universal equality that it is practically a potato. But, that said, what is called a “right” for some should obviously be extended to all.) But to report on the president’s “change of heart” without explaining the politics–the actual politics–at play is lazy and actually does a disservice to the LGBTQ community and to the larger debate.

Perhaps it is with that sort of gimlet eye that Slate/CBS reporter John Dickerson tweeted:

Joe Biden has such an impact on evolution you’d think if you put a amoeba next to him it would be a horse in a day.

The truth, of course, is that Gay money has such an impact on evolution that when you put a plasmodial mass of jelly next to it, it becomes a spine.

That is not an insult–it’s a lesson. Hats off to the LGBTQ groups that have worked so hard over the years–they have now twice demonstrated (with marriage equality and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) that they understand how to move the Obama administration. They should keep this in mind moving forward (and push for something tangible, like an executive order on discrimination, and not just fall in love with the president’s personal evolution)–and other parts of the president’s purported coalition should take this to heart.

And now you know. . . the rest of the story.

Good day!

Obama Sides with GOP Against Reid in Battle over Nuclear Regulator

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In a move that could be seen as election-year expedience, a friendly nod to the nuclear industry, or a sign of a coming battle with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the Obama administration announced Thursday that it would nominate Kristine Svinicki for a second term on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Reid had gone public just a day earlier with his objections to Commissioner Svinicki getting another five-year appointment when her tenure expires at the end of June.

Svinicki, a George W. Bush appointee to the NRC, is considered a staunch ally of the nuclear industry, and, according to Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, “is amongst the worst of the NRC Commissioners when it comes to implementing Fukushima lessons learned for safety upgrades at US reactors.” Svinicki voted for the rubberstamp relicensing of Vermont Yankee’s GE Mark I reactor, and then pushed hard for NRC staff to finalize the paperwork just days after identical reactors experienced catastrophic safety failures at Fukushima Daiichi, and she has continued to fight new requirements for nuclear plants based on lessons learned from the Japanese disaster.

Prior to her time on the NRC, Svinicki served in the Department of Energy’s Washington, DC Offices of Nuclear Energy, Science and Technology, and of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and also served on the staff of then-Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), whom Kamps called “one of the most pro-nuclear US Senators of the past 15 years.”

During Svinicki’s time at DoE, she worked extensively on support documents for the proposed national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. But in testimony during her 2007 Senate confirmation hearing for her NRC post, Svinicki was asked by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) if she worked “directly on Yucca”–and Svinicki replied, “I did not, no.”

This obfuscation–or “lie” as Reid has called it–is the official inflection point for the Nevada Senator’s objection to Svinicki’s re-up, but the full story has several layers.

Don’t open that mountain, Fibber

The proposed waste facility at Yucca Mountain has been a thorn in the side of Nevada politicians for decades. Harry Reid has made stopping the Yucca project his life’s work, and with the elevation of his former aid, Gregory Jaczko, to the chairmanship of the NRC, and the decision by the White House to defund further development of the site, it seemed like the Majority Leader had accomplished his goal.

But there is no current substitute for the Yucca site. The US nuclear power industry continues to produce thousands of tons of toxic waste in the form of highly radioactive “spent” fuel rods. That waste is currently stored around the country, on the grounds of the nation’s reactor fleet, in “spent fuel pools,” which require a steady power source to keep cooling water circulating, or once the spent fuel is a little older, in what are called “dry casks”–massive concrete coffins of a sort–and neither of these was intended to be anything but a temporary solution.

The nation’s fuel pools are already filled beyond their intended capacity. That makes them hotter, and, so, more dangerous. The higher temperatures and greater concentration of radioactive fuel mean that pools that suffer a power loss are in danger of boiling off their water faster–and without the cooling liquid, the cladding on the fuel rods can melt and catch fire, sending vast amounts of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. In fact, it is the damaged spent fuel pool at Fukushima Daiichi reactor 4 that currently has those watching the Japanese crisis most concerned.

Dry casks are considered safer than liquid storage, but can only be used once fuel has had a chance to cool for years in pools. Further, some of the nation’s casks are already showing cracks, while others have moved during earthquakes.

The bottom line is that nuclear power plants cannot refuel without a place to put the old rods, and with onsite storage space exhausted, a long-term solution is needed. If the nuclear industry is to pursue license extensions for its 104 aging reactors, not to mention seek to expand that number with new construction, it needs a facility like Yucca Mountain, and it needs it fast.

But Yucca Mountain is not only opposed by all major Nevada politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, it has proven to be a tremendously bad place for nuclear waste. The volcanic formation is more porous and less isolated than originally believed–there is evidence that water can seep in, there are seismic concerns, worries about the possibility of new volcanic activity, and a disturbing proximity to underground aquifers. In addition, Yucca mountain has deep spiritual significance for the Shoshone and Paiute peoples.

So what’s a nuclear industry to do?

One avenue might be to unseat the men most responsible for killing the project.

New coup review

Kristine Svinicki was at the center of attempts to oust Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko that went public late last year when Svinicki and the three other commissioners serving with Jaczko sent a letter to the White House complaining about their chairman’s management style. Central to the complaint, the way in which Jaczko used his authority to recommend that the Yucca project be terminated.

Also in the letter, the allegation that Jaczko was verbally abusive to female NRC employees, including Svinicki.

The complaint prompted hearings in both the House and Senate, with rather predictable, partisan results. Republicans, especially in the House, used the time to berate Jaczko and defend the nuclear industry, while Democrats tended to back Jaczko and highlight his focus on improved nuclear plant safety, especially in the wake of the Fukushima crisis. And while the White House voiced tepid support for its NRC chief, it seemed at the time like Jaczko owed at least some of his job security to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

But this part of the story is not over. There has already been one Inspector General’s report on Jaczko’s management, and another is due later this spring. The GOP-led House has also scheduled more hearings on this for the end of May.

Elections have consequences

While Svinicki’s performance as a nuclear regulator ranks poorly–even among a long line of industry-captured NRC commissioners–it is her work on Yucca Mountain and her role in the attempted ouster of Greg Jaczko that factor most prominently in the brewing standoff between President Obama and Senator Reid.

In a move that might be seen as funny if it weren’t so intertwined with nuclear safety, a small parade of Republicans took to the Senate floor this week to praise Commissioner Svinicki–not so much as a nuclear-friendly regulator, but as a whistleblower:

Senate Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) charged that Svinicki was being delayed because of “retribution.”

“She has had the courage to step forward and has blown the whistle on the chairman,” Murkowski added, “and the chairman happens to be a good friend of Sen. Reid. So the question should be put to Sen. Reid: Why is he not allowing her to advance?”

Republicans, it seems, see this as a chance to counter the current “war on women” election-year narrative by showing their support not for a good friend to a friendly industry, but for an abused working woman. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) put it this way:

McConnell accuses Democrats of retaliating against NRC Commissioner Kristine Svinicki for taking part in an organized effort to oust NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko last year.

“Commissioner Svinicki stood up to this guy, who somehow managed to avoid being fired in the wake of all these revelations, in an effort to preserve the integrity of the agency, and to protect the career staffers who were the subject of the chairman’s tactics,” said McConnell on the Senate floor Wednesday. “And now, for some mysterious reason, she’s being held up for re-nomination.”

President Obama, however, moved to undermine the GOP. . . by siding with them:

The White House plans to renominate a Republican member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, forestalling a potential fight with Senate Republicans over whether she would be tapped to continue serving after raising concerns with the panel’s Democratic chairman.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explained it this way: “The president will renominate Ms. Svinicki. He doesn’t want to have a break in service in June when her current term expires.”

Now that actually is funny–and like all good humor, it’s funny on several levels.

First, rather than facilitating the work of the nation’s top nuclear regulator, Svinicki has worked hard to weaken the NRC’s oversight role. From the previously noted quickie relicensing of Vermont Yankee, to consistent votes against requiring upgrades recommended by the commission’s post-Fukushima taskforce–even for yet-to-be-built reactors–to her role in the time-consuming coup attempt, Svinicki has made the NRC demonstrably less effective.

Second, remember what body has to hold hearings on Svinicki’s nomination, and then hold a vote to re-confirm her? That would be the Senate. And remember who runs the Senate? That would be Harry Reid–the same Harry Reid who just one day earlier had publicly registered his strong opposition to Svinicki. If the White House were really concerned with a speedy confirmation and no interruption in service, wouldn’t it have been better to coordinate a pick with the Majority Leader, rather than pointedly show him up?

Third, a “break in service”–the absence of one commissioner for some amount of time–should that occur, would not stop plant inspections. It would not stop enforcement of current safety regulations. No, the only thing a missing commissioner might delay is the approval of new reactors or the relicensing of old ones.

Still, this could be seen as classic “no drama Obama,” distilled in the crucible of an election, were it not for the consistent influence of the nuclear industry on the Obama administration. The evidence is as unavoidable as the presence of radioactive cesium in your broccoli–and just as unsettling. From the nuclear industry’s hefty contributions to Obama’s campaigns, to generating giant Exelon’s ties to Obama and confidants like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod; from the president’s pledge of billions in loan guarantees for nuclear plant construction, to his appointment of nuclear industry insider William Magwood to the NRC; right through to Obama’s inclusion of atomic power in his smorgasbord of an energy policy at a time when much of the industrialized world is turning away from nuclear, the move by the White House to back Republican Svinicki isn’t just a political bugaboo. . . it’s a feature.

And while keeping Kristine Svinicki in place would be a nice amuse-bouche for Obama’s nuclear godfathers, nothing would satisfy the industry quite as much as Harry Reid’s head on a plate. For even though Nevada’s other Senator, Republican Dean Heller, also opposes the Yucca Mountain repository, he is not in either side’s leadership, and does not wield the power that Reid does. And without Reid in leadership to backup his former aid, it is likely Gregory Jaczko would be forced out as NRC chair.

And without Reid or Jaczko in the way, the path to reopening Yucca–as well as the path to relicensing a bevy of 40-year-old reactors with few new requirements–would be as clear as a Cherenkov blue pool.

Watch this space

As for now, of course, Harry Reid is still very much in place, and so is Greg Jaczko. The fight to hold the Senate for the Democrats, and, if that is accomplished, the fight Reid will have to remain as majority leader, are still down the road. First up is the battle over Kristine Svinicki.

On one side, you have Reid, along with Senators like Barbara Boxer and Bernie Sanders–all theoretically part of Obama’s power base, all realistically representing states Obama needs to win in November.

On the other side, you have the Senate Minority Leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and Wyoming’s junior Senator, John Barrasso–all partisan Republicans, all from states Obama won’t likely win this fall, nor will he need to.

If you were thinking in purely electoral terms, how would you handicap this fight?

But because Obama has renominated Svinicki, and because the president has opened up a public rift with his party’s Senate Majority Leader, it would appear more than simple election year vote counting is going on here. Is it just another case of Obama “going along to get along” with a GOP that has never had much interest in getting along with him, or is this another example of a president that campaigned on a green, alternative energy future showing that his real investment is in the dying, dirty and dangerous technologies of the past? Or is this about a coming showdown between Obama and Reid?

The choices are not mutually exclusive. Like that slogan Obama insists on calling an energy strategy, the answer could be “all of the above.”

* * *

Important Reminder: This Sunday, April 22, at 5 PM EDT/2 PM PDT, I will be hosting Firedoglake’s book salon. This week’s book is The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World’s Most Dangerous Fuel, and we will have authors Martin Cohen and Andrew McKillop online answering questions. There is much to discuss about the history of nuclear mythmaking in this book, please join us.

Score One for Big Nuclear: Kaptur Bests Kucinich in Ohio Primary

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Davis-Besse and its critic, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D OH-9). (photos: NRC & Rep. Kucinich)

Fifteen-term House veteran Marcy Kaptur has defeated seven-term incumbent Dennis Kucinich in Tuesday’s primary for Ohio’s 9th congressional district. Rep. Kucinich previously represented OH-10, but was forced to compete with Kaptur when Ohio lost two seats in the last census. Republicans in the Ohio State House (with the blessing of US House Speaker–and OH-8 Representative–John Boehner) merged two Democratic strongholds into a new 9th district that included parts of Kucinich’s Cleveland base, but was dominated by Kaptur’s old Toledo constituency.

With nine-tenths of precincts reporting, Kaptur leads Kucinich, 60 to 39 percent.

Both members of the progressive caucus, Kucinich and Kaptur have been on the same side of many issues–each has a 95 rating from the AFL-CIO and a 100 percent score from the ACLU–but, as John Nichols points out, they had their differences, too:

Kucinich, who for many years voted with opponents of reproductive rights, switched his position before the 2004 presidential election and ran this year as the more socially liberal contender. Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in the House and a champion of many feminist causes, was ranked as “mixed choice” by NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Kucinich was also a stronger critic of America’s military follies, and pointed out that Kaptur, the Democrats’ number two on the powerful Appropriations Committee, should have pushed harder for cuts in defense spending.

But for readers of this column, one of the clearest dividing lines between the two Ohio pols was drawn earlier this year when Kucinich and Kaptur both attended a public forum on the future of one of America’s most troubled nuclear plants. The Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station, near Oak Harbor, Ohio, rests inside of Kaptur’s old OH-9, just east of Kucinich’s current district, and, well, it’s had some problems:

[In November 2011] a fire at Ohio’s crippled Davis-Besse facility cut ventilation to the reactor control room. A faulty valve in a pipe sending water to the reactor core leaked on an electrical switchbox, triggering an electrical arc, which started the fire. This could have been a potentially catastrophic emergency. . . had the reactor not been shut down seven weeks earlier to replace an already once previously replaced, corroded, 82-ton reactor lid. This “transplant operation” revealed a 30-foot crack in the concrete shield building that will require a separate repair program. . . .

That repair program is still nowhere near completion. And all of this was on top of acid leaks years earlier that caused some of the worst corrosion ever seen at a US reactor–a lapse that cost plant operator FirstEnergy some $33 million in government fines and civil penalties.

But with all that on the table, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission still gave its thumbs-up to a reactor restart in December. Then, one day after the OK, FirstEnergy admitted it had withheld news of new cracks discovered on a different part of Davis-Besse a month earlier. But FirstEnergy said it had only hidden that information from the public–the NRC had been clued in. So, the nuclear regulator knew of the latest problems and still gave the go-ahead to a restart.

And the reason we know all of this is because of Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

An ardent critic of Davis-Besse for years, Kucinich called for a public meeting with the NRC and FirstEnergy before the new Ohio district lines were announced. And it was at this meeting in early January where some of the latest news was revealed–along with the contrasting positions of Kucinich and Kaptur.

As was reported here the next day, both House members were in attendance, and Kucinich made his position clear, saying his fight was with the NRC and FirstEnergy, not Kaptur:

“The cracking is not architectural, it’s structural,” Kucinich said. “FirstEnergy finally admitted this tonight. It’s an issue of public trust. FirstEnergy did not give the public, media or us a true picture of what really happened at the start.”

Rep. Kucinich has repeatedly stated that the Davis-Besse reactor should not have been allowed to restart until plant operators and regulators could explain why the reactor building was cracking and prove that the problem had been arrested. To date, neither of those criteria has been met.

Kaptur, for her part, tried to finesse it–if you can call this finesse:

“I came to assure the people that I am a proponent of public safety, I am convinced the NRC did its job this time, and I also want to see advanced energy production that’s affordable and see the plant increase employment,” Kaptur said. “We have to live in the 21st century . . . not the 20th . . . which is what Davis-Besse is providing. I know what [Kucinich] believes, but I’m in my 30th year as a public servant and I think I’ve learned something in that time.”

Again, as noted in January, the jobs claim made little sense, and the idea that a light water reactor from the 1970s represents living in the 21st Century makes even less. Kaptur’s concern for public safety is a hard match for a facility that has been the site of two of the five most dangerous US nuclear events since 1979.

As for “affordable,” it always bears repeating:

[N]uclear power–with its construction costs, costs of operation, costs of fuel mining and refining, costs of spent fuel storage, accident clean-ups, tax breaks, rate subsidies and federal loan guarantees–is one of the most phenomenally uneconomical ways of producing electricity ever conceived.

Kaptur’s faith in the NRC was also not borne out by the facts. As explained here, the government regulator relied on industry assurances of Davis-Besse’s safety, summing up their supposedly convincing findings this way: “Concrete has a tendency to crack.”

Davis-Besse, in fact, is one of best examples of the cracks inherent in the US nuclear regulatory system, and we know this to a large part thanks to steady pressure applied by Ohio’s own Dennis Kucinich.

* * *

Next January, Kucinich will no longer be a member of Congress, and the House will lose one of its most vocal critics of this country’s dangerous and dirty nuclear boondoggle. If past is prologue, Kaptur cannot be expected to pick up her departing colleague’s fight, so when the next accident happens at Ohio’s Davis-Besse plant–and it is almost certain there will be a next accident–Kaptur will be partly responsible.

But it would be unfair to hand her all the blame–she is, after all, a formidable Democrat in her own right, and she was just fighting to keep her seat. That Ohio is losing two congressional seats is due to population shifts, but that the GOP was in charge of drawing up Ohio’s new districts, that they control the state legislature and the governorship–not to mention the US House of Representatives–that blame can be shared by Kaptur’s colleagues in the Democratic leadership, as well as the Obama administration, for it was the White House and congressional leaders that squandered the mandate of 2008 and created the space for the Republican resurgence in 2010.

This is not the place for a lengthy analysis of the rise of the Tea-O-P, but it is interesting to note that one issue where Kaptur has made a name for herself is in speaking out against the bank bailouts. And, in opposing Wall Street and the banksters, the 29-year House vet sounded markedly different than President Barack Obama or even then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi did during the 111th Congress. If Obama and Democratic leaders had chosen to sound an emotional chord more like Kaptur’s, one has to wonder if the losses in Congress and in state houses across the country would have been nearly as dramatic–and so one has to wonder where redistricting would be with more Democrats in control.

And, it is perhaps more ironic than emblematic, but it still deserves mention: Kaptur’s Republican opponent in November will be none other than pantomime populist Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, hero of the tea-stained right.

With the recently announced retirement by Rep. Norm Dicks (WA-6), Kaptur could take the gavel at Appropriations, should the Democrats retake the House. Even if she is just Ranking Member, her status and power will rise. She can wield that power in many ways–and some might even be good–but it is doubtful she will give nuclear oversight even a fraction of the attention exhibited by the man she beat Tuesday night.

Nuclear industry acolytes might be applauding the end of the electoral career of a persistent critic, but atoms aren’t Tinkerbelle; no one can clap loud enough to make nuclear power’s numerous problems go away. Kaptur’s defeat of Dennis Kucinich might seem like Big Nuclear’s win–and maybe in the short-term it is–but without more vocal and visible watchdogs like the Ohio Representative, everyone loses in the end. Everyone.

Energy Innovation: Obama’s State of the Union a Frothy Mix of Promise and Prattle

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It’s an election year, another presidential campaign is upon us, and since it is going to be so very much upon us every day from now until November, it would be nice to find something about which to get excited.

There is nothing to get excited about on the Republican side of the aisle. The knock-down, drag-out contest between the stupid, the rude, and the just plain offensive may provide the Democrats with the best gift since, oh, you know, the last Republican president, but for the American people, none of the GOP contenders is a prize. It will be truly hellish to have to listen to any one of them for the duration of the campaign.

So, when I turned on the TV last night, I wanted to stand up and cheer. While watching President Obama’s State of the Union address, I felt much like I did when I watched his 2008 acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver. OK, that’s not true–not hardly. Reality has not been kind to Obama’s rhetoric, after all. But when Obama got to the energy section of the speech, I found much to applaud, not unlike in 2008. . . with some obvious caveats for his praise of dirty, dangerous, failed or flat-out fictional forms of energy production.

During the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama always made a point of touting “clean coal” in his energy policy stump speech. As president, he included this nonsense phrase in both his 2010 and 2011 State of the Union speeches. This year, however, though Obama extolled an “All of the above” energy mix, and then went into some detail about what that “all” should include, there was no reference to coal, “clean” or otherwise (AKA “dirty,” AKA “the way coal actually is”).

The ’08 campaign contained frequent references to nuclear power, too. Obama also would clean those up, often by calling for “safe nuclear.” It was, to my ear, just as imaginary–and just as dishonest–as “clean coal,” and it made me wary of a candidate that I already knew was heavily dependent on nuclear industry contributions to fund his campaign. But last night, “nuclear” only came up three times–twice while talking about Iran, and once more when discussing nuclear proliferation, in general. There was no reference to nuclear power.

Funny that. I guess with 44 domestic coal mine fatalities since Obama took office, and with approximately 20 percent of US coal-fired power plants failing to meet clean air standards, maybe coal doesn’t sound so much like “winning the future.” And after nuclear power’s 2011–with Japan’s Fukushima disaster still metastasizing and dozens of smaller events at aging plants here raising important questions about safety–touting atomic energy is not how you fuel “an America built to last.”

And therein lies the big, flashing yellow caution. For while Obama’s speech did much, again, to sing the praises of investment in clean, green, renewable energy sources, I know that whatever the president allots to alternatives in his next budget (we still do budgets, right? not just hostage-taking, continuing resolution kabuki stand-offs), it will be but a tiny fraction of what he has already given to and will continue to shower upon the fossil and fissile fuel lobbies.

There are several examples of this rhetorical shell game in the State of the Union speech. While Obama did make this admirable call:

We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising.

It was only moments after the president said:

Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.

I worry, too, that when Obama says, “I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects,” that what he means by “red tape” is what many call “environmental protections.” Or “workplace safety rules.” Or “worker rights.” Just as I worry that when I hear, “I’m directing my Administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes,” it is opening a door to more private development on public lands.

Is this cynical? Perhaps, but it is hard not to be when you hear the president claim, as he did last night, “I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago,” when just a day earlier it was revealed that the Obama administration actively worked to downplay the size of the BP spill.

And so what is the public to make of Obama’s section on natural gas?

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

So many questions. First off, it is important to note that Obama is talking about fracking without ever using the word. That’s what it means when the president says he will require drillers to disclose the chemicals they use–these are the chemicals that make the “hydro” in hydrofracking heavy enough to do its job. And these are the chemicals that have likely poisoned some aquifers and promise to befoul even more.

But the poisonous and all-too-secret chemical composition of the injection liquid is only one of many problems with fracked natural gas. There is mounting evidence that fracking is responsible for increased seismic activity in the US and abroad. And, of course, there is the $64 question of whether we should be investing in and smoothing the way for a finite resource that will contribute to CO2 emissions at a time when the world is fast approaching irreversible climate change.

But push that aside, and the president’s fulsome gas promises are still mostly hot air. That name-your-chemicals rule? It only applies to drilling on public lands. And the president doesn’t say if it will apply to projects already approved, or just future leases. And those 600,000 jobs? I need the administration to show its work, for that number sound suspiciously like the trumped up job figures floated in the push for the Keystone XL pipeline–where it turned out that every year of a job counted as a separate job, and that many positions were low wage or instantly redundant.

With so much so easily picked apart, it is hard not to hear “America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk,” as the 2012 edition of “I promise this won’t hurt a bit,” or “the check is in the mail”. . . or “clean coal.”

But, as I said, I want to stand up and cheer, and so let me close by cheering this:

Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.

Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy.

. . . .

Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

Yes, I will admit, that internal ellipsis mark covers many, many paragraphs, but though the execution laid out within is mixed, the overarching sentiment should be one of the clarion calls of this election year. As I recently explained at some length, real innovation is essential to America’s future, and basic research is essential to real innovation. And government money spent on basic research provides much more bang for the buck than money spent on propping up out-dated energy sources and the military industrial complex.

Obama doesn’t say “peace dividend,” but that is what he is talking about. It is a dividend that could grow if the president follows through with his drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, and it is time to start building into the discussion the idea that this money will be repurposed to spur innovation, rebuild our infrastructure and invest in education. This is a wealthy nation, and the US should spend its wealth on programs and projects that benefit the vast majority of its people–say, 99 percent of them–and not just use the current lull in foreign incursions to fund more tax cuts for the richest one percent.

For reinforcing that frame, and for at least sowing the seeds of a re-prioritized economy, I applaud the president. Now it is up to him to play on the pitch he has planted. Given the scores of disappointments that have trailed after so many of Obama’s lofty speeches in the past, I am wary that this is little more than another field of dreams–but guess what, with alternative energy, education investment, and a modernized infrastructure, if you build it, “an America built to last” will quite possibly come.

Too hopey-changey? Well, at least he’s stopped shilling for “clean coal.”

Nuclear Regulator Adds Heat to 2012 Congressional Race

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Congratulations go out this first week of the new year to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for giving Democrats in Ohio’s 9th congressional district a reason to come out and vote in their March 6 primary. . . and for giving residents from Toledo to Cleveland, not to mention those in a large swath of southern Michigan, something to keep them up at night.

As previously reported, the NRC waited till very late on a December Friday to announce a restart of the Davis-Besse nuclear facility, located near Oak Harbor, Ohio, on the banks of Lake Erie. Davis-Besse, of course, has a rap sheet as long and as disturbing as any power plant in the country:

. . . a fire at Ohio’s crippled Davis-Besse facility cut ventilation to the reactor control room. A faulty valve in a pipe sending water to the reactor core leaked on an electrical switchbox, triggering an electrical arc, which started the fire. This could have been a potentially catastrophic emergency. . . had the reactor not been shut down seven weeks earlier to replace an already once previously replaced, corroded, 82-ton reactor lid. This “transplant operation” revealed a 30-foot crack in the concrete shield building that will require a separate repair program. . . which will in no way be completed before the end of the year.

This was all on top of dangerous acid leaks discovered years earlier that caused what was called the worst corrosion ever seen at a US reactor. For their lack of attention to this little detail, Davis-Besse operator FirstEnergy was fined $5.45 million by regulators, and the company agreed to pay another $28 million in civil penalties.

All of this was public information before the NRC signed off on the December restart. But then:

[O]n December 7, one day after the reactor restart, FirstEnergy, Davis-Besse’s operator, admitted that they had withheld news of new cracks on a different part of the structure, which were discovered in November.

But, hey, FirstEnergy said that they only had withheld this information from the public, and that they indeed did report it to the NRC–which, as was observed at the time, raises some serious questions about the honesty, independence and competency of that body.

Well, one month after the commission gave its latest blessing to Davis-Besse, the NRC arranged a public meeting to explain its decision.

Wait–that’s not quite right. Representatives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and FirstEnergy were at a public meeting December January 5 at the request Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D), who currently represents Ohio’s 10th congressional district, which lies to the east of Davis-Besse.

And there’s the rub. A victim of a population shift and a gerrymander by state Republicans, Kucinich’s district is disappearing in the next Congress. After much consideration, Rep. Kucinich recently announced that he would try to win back a seat in Congress representing Ohio’s 9th district, thus setting up a primary against House veteran Marcy Kaptur, the Democrat who has represented OH-9 for 29 years.

It should be noted that Kucinich has been on the Davis-Besse case for a very long time, and had called for the public meeting before the new district lines were drawn. But, as fate would have it, both Representatives Kucinich and Kaptur appeared at Thursday’s event.

Kucinich stated that his fight this January night was with the NRC and FirstEnergy, and not with Kaptur, but the contrast was there all the same:

“The cracking is not architectural, it’s structural,” Kucinich said. “FirstEnergy finally admitted this tonight. It’s an issue of public trust. FirstEnergy did not give the public, media or us a true picture of what really happened at the start.”

Rep. Kucinich has repeatedly stated that the Davis-Besse reactor should not have been allowed to restart until plant operators and regulators could explain why the reactor building was cracking and prove that the problem had been arrested. To date, neither of those criteria has been met.

Despite this uncertainty, Rep. Kaptur, whose district includes the troubled nuclear plant, supports the course currently set by the NRC and FirstEnergy–at least that seems to be what she’s saying:

“I came to assure the people that I am a proponent of public safety, I am convinced the NRC did its job this time, and I also want to see advanced energy production that’s affordable and see the plant increase employment,” Kaptur said. “We have to live in the 21st century . . . not the 20th . . . which is what Davis-Besse is providing. I know what [Kucinich] believes, but I’m in my 30th year as a public servant and I think I’ve learned something in that time.”

The Davis-Besse plant is said to account for about 800 jobs–though, since none of the players is proposing the decommissioning of the reactor, it is not clear how delaying restart until safety issues are addressed would change the employment picture. As for living in the 21st Century instead of the 20th, perhaps Kaptur has forgotten that Davis-Besse broke ground in 1970, and came on line in 1978. Its light water reactor design is older still.

As for believing in public safety, beyond the recent fire, the two reactor head replacements and the numerous unexplained cracks, Kaptur probably should be reminded that the plant in her district is the site of two of the five most dangerous US nuclear events since 1979.

As for “energy production that’s affordable,” even a casual reader is by now aware that nuclear power–with its construction costs, costs of operation, costs of fuel mining and refining, costs of spent fuel storage, accident clean-ups, tax breaks, rate subsidies and federal loan guarantees–is one of the most phenomenally uneconomical ways of producing electricity ever conceived.

And, as for the NRC doing its job–“there is a high level of assurance that the reactor building is safe,” said Cynthia Pederson, a regional director with the NRC responsible for the Midwest. But Pederson also confirmed that their investigation into the cracks is ongoing, and most notably, that the NRC is relying on FirstEnergy to sort it all out:

The commission signed off on restarting the plant following several tests and after its owner, FirstEnergy Corp., assured it that the cracks don’t pose a threat.

The commission has given Akron-based FirstEnergy until the end of February to find out what caused the cracks.

Until the cause is known, there’s no reason to order closer inspections at other plants with similar concrete shields, Pederson said.

It’s possible that the cracks have been around for a while, she said. “Concrete has a tendency to crack,” she said.

“Concrete has a tendency to crack”–how is that an acceptable “finding” from a representative of the regulatory agency responsible for guaranteeing the safety of nuclear reactors? Pederson, in her statements Thursday, has made it quite clear that her agency has no idea why the Davis-Besse containment structure is cracking, or whether it has stopped cracking, and that the NRC has relied on the operator’s assurance that the cracks “don’t pose a threat.”

Remember, this is the same operator that previously had to pay out over $33 million in penalties for a previous lapse in judgment, and has just been caught concealing knowledge of additional cracks.

And beyond those structural cracks, Davis-Besse has, time and again, revealed the troubling cracks in the system. Looking at the history of this Ohio reactor–let alone the history of atomic power across the country–the federal agency responsible for policing the nuclear industry has instead proven itself the patsy. FirstEnergy has proven itself untrustworthy, yet the NRC has said that it trusts them, and that the public should trust them, too.

And now, by coming down on the side of FirstEnergy, Marcy Kaptur has volunteered her constituents as participants in this trust exercise, as well. Rep. Kucinich chooses to trust evidence over faith–and that evidence says Davis-Besse is not just an accident waiting to happen, it is a series of accidents, some still in waiting, some now evolving. With the terrifying results of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident still very much developing, it seems naïve if not criminal to give the nuclear industry the benefit of the doubt.

So, this first week of 2012, the Kaptur-Kucinich race already has a clear issue. Residents of Ohio’s 9th, you have a clear choice.

The Party Line – August 12, 2011: Obama, Drew Westen, and Me

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Watching Barack Obama deliver his jobs speech Thursday in Holland, MI, I couldn’t help but wonder if the president had read Drew Westen’s critique in last weekend’s New York Times.

Under the headline “What Happened to Obama?” Westen, an Emory University psychology professor and Democratic communications guru of a sort, tried to divine the source of the Obama administration’s trouble. The seeds were sown, Westen explains, in the opening minutes of the presidency, as Obama delivered his inaugural address.

As Westen recounts (in words remarkably similar to ones I’ve used in the past), Obama’s speech failed to tell the story of the disaster that had befallen America during the Bush years:

That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.

And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.

In fact, Westen and I use the exact same phrase for the core message that Obama needed to communicate out of the box: “your government has your back again.”

That would be as opposed to Wall Street’s back, or the Banksters’ backs, corporations’ backs, or the wealthiest of the wealthy’s backs.

Westen reminds us that narrative—a structure for understanding the world around us as old as humanity itself—needs opposing forces. Narrative honors heroes, yes, but in order for there to be heroes, there also has to be a villain—and Obama’s seemingly obsessive refusal to name the villains not only undermined his administration’s narrative, it communicated that the architects of America’s misfortunes would not be held accountable.

This (again, as I have often said) created the space for the various TEA parties, and their sympathizers and sycophants. Yes, this so-called populist anger has been nourished, exploited, and in some cases manufactured by some of the very people and organizations—let’s go ahead and call them villains—that helped tank the economy, but it would have been a much harder task to gin up this “movement” if Obama had dared to call out these villains from the get-go.

But he didn’t then, and he continues to spare the rod and spoil the spoiled today. Even with popular opinion overwhelmingly favoring higher taxes on wealthy individuals and windfall corporate profits, President Obama bent over backwards to again avoid naming names.

As witnessed Monday by NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro, this avoidance is comprehensive and conscious:

It was striking how far they went to try not to point fingers. As a matter of fact, just before the president began speaking today, I was able to see the printed text of his comments on the teleprompter, and I watched a last minute edit that may give some insight. One passage of the speech referred to asking for sacrifice from those who can most afford to pay their fair share. And as I was looking at the teleprompter, the phrase wealthy Americans and corporations was highlighted and deleted from the text.

Because of that failure to finger, and a striking lack of proactive ideas in general, Obama’s Monday White House matinee served up a nothing-burger deluxe—not at all rare these days, I’m afraid, and also not well done. He wasn’t selling the steak, he wasn’t selling the sizzle, and he wasn’t telling a very good story in structural terms, either.

But the president very much needs to tell a story—to construct a narrative—because he very much needs to sell something: himself.

And so, in what was very clearly a campaign-style appearance at the Johnson Controls factory in Holland, president/candidate Barack Obama tried his hand at crafting a Drew Westen-style traditional narrative:

We know there are things we can do right now that will help accelerate growth and job creation –- that will support the work going on here at Johnson Controls, here in Michigan, and all across America. We can do some things right now that will make a difference. We know there are things we have to do to erase a legacy of debt that hangs over the economy. But time and again, we’ve seen partisan brinksmanship get in the way -– as if winning the next election is more important than fulfilling our responsibilities to you and to our country. This downgrade you’ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress. See, it didn’t happen because we don’t have the capacity to pay our bills -– it happened because Washington doesn’t have the capacity to come together and get things done. It was a self-inflicted wound.

So, “brinksmanship” is the big, bad wolf? Washington is the villain? Well, as Obama tells it, yes, but more specifically, it has been decided by the White House political team that the Lex Luthor to Obama’s Superman (if not his kryptonite) is Congress:

They’re common-sense ideas that have been supported in the past by Democrats and Republicans, things that are supported by Carl Levin. The only thing keeping us back is our politics. The only thing preventing these bills from being passed is the refusal of some folks in Congress to put the country ahead of party. There are some in Congress right now who would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.

And that has to stop. It’s got to stop. We’re supposed to all be on the same team, especially when we’re going through tough times. We can’t afford to play games — not right now, not when the stakes are so high for our economy.

And if you agree with me –- it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent — you’ve got to let Congress know. You’ve got to tell them you’ve had enough of the theatrics. You’ve had enough of the politics. Stop sending out press releases. Start passing some bills that we all know will help our economy right now. That’s what they need to do — they’ve got to hear from you.

I will give the president a tiny bit of credit in that, instead of the wholly empty pleading for a similar call to Congress that he stroked during the debt-ceiling circle-jerk, Obama did list a series of actions he’d like Congress to approve (as meaningless, dangerous or counterproductive as many of them may be). But Obama also bragged about what he was able to get done without having to go through Congress. And Obama made it clear throughout: America, you’ve got problems, and those problems have their provenance on Capitol Hill.

Running against the “Do-nothing Congress” may have worked well for Harry Truman, and running against Washington is a time-tested tactic for many aspirants to higher office, but where does this get us?

It might work out OK for Obama. He has pretty much made being “above it all” his raison d’être, and by avoiding direct engagement with the big issues of our day, he might be able to slough off some of the Beltway taint. But where does it leave the rest of the Democrats? We really don’t have to ask because we have an example, it’s called the midterms. Obama did plenty of Congress-bashing during the summer of 2010. He railed against establishment Washington, even though he and his party had been that establishment for the previous twenty months, and when the dust cleared, America had the “divided government” Obama likes to point out “America voted for.”

Except they didn’t. America doesn’t elect our government on a national proportional basis. America votes state by state and district by district, and if voters in those specific races voted at all, they voted against a disappointing two years, not for a political concept.

And if the antagonist in Obama’s campaign narrative is Congress, then, in practice, the villain he wants Americans to rally against is elected government itself.

And that’s not only dangerous to sitting members of Congress, that’s dangerous for the democracy. It affirms the agenda of the elites, it confirms the fears of the TEA parties, and it will make voters across the board more cynical and less inclined to get involved.

So, did the president or his political team read the Westen piece, and did they decide to refine this Congress-as-villain narrative as an answer? I have no way of knowing, of course, but if they did, I do know they’re doing it wrong.

But in crafting his critique of the president’s path, Drew Westen also might have made some mistakes. First, Westen doesn’t allow himself to take the next step—beyond story-craft to actual belief. In wondering “What happened to Obama,” Westen can’t bring himself to conclude the answer might be “nothing.” It is possible, sad though it may be, that while America thought it was electing a man from the party of FDR, it instead got a confirmed Hooverite. So much of Obama’s language of late seems to point that way, not to mention his policies, and let us not forget the time he spent raising elbows with the magical marketeers at the University of Chicago.

Second, Westen also bemoans the “dialing for dollars” culture that pervades and pollutes national politics. Huffington Post senior Washington correspondent Dan Froomkin also tried to explain it earlier this week:

Progressives say Washington’s governing class absorbed its bias toward austerity — and, implicitly an agenda favoring the wealthy — by osmosis.

“The people who do fundraisers are the people who don’t want to pay taxes,” [Roosevelt Institute fellow Rob] Johnson said.

Politicians “spend an awful lot of time calling people with assets,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal think tank. “You don’t spend a lot of time with people who aren’t affluent, and you certainly don’t have extended discussions with them about economic policy.” Over time, Borosage said, “you develop a set of self-justifying rationalizations,” he said.

Westen makes it seem like it is virtually impossible for the president—or any president, really—to both single out Wall Street and Corporate elites for blame and simultaneously ring them up for campaign cash. But Westen doesn’t call out the president for failing to capitalize (as it were) on his ability to change that culture.

Obama has hinted at wanting to be a transformational figure (and others have assigned that role to him, outright), and one of the things that once made that seem possible, at least to me, was the way he ran his 2008 campaign.

Prior to Obama, from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign onward, the prevailing logic in national campaigns was that they had to emulate the Republican successes of the 1980s—chase big-donor money, and you can effectively buy all the votes you need. However, with Hillary Clinton having locked up much of the early establishment money in ’08, the Obama campaign set up an unprecedented (dare we say “transformative?”) structure for collecting small-donor contributions. . . and then they set out to motivate those potential small donors. Yes, in time, big-donor bucks did fund half of Obama’s awesome campaign coffer, but initially the strategy was seemingly the opposite of the Terry McAuliffe-Bill-and-Hillary Clinton tack—instead of chasing the money to woo the voters, Team Obama chased the voters to woo the money.

But that is not what the Obama campaign is doing this time. Publicly hostile to his liberal political base, and privately nervous about his Obama for America, small-donor fund-raising base, the president is heading straight for the big money for 2012. The Chicago campaign staff is already bragging about its bankroll. Obama has been courting classic big-ticket bundlers at old-school four- and five-figure-a-plate fundraisers, and, in fact, on his way back from Michigan, the president stopped off in New York for just such a soirée.

It is in this case where Obama once proved that he could change the game—that he could be a transformational figure—and it is here where he has pointedly chosen not to. There comes a point where we have to stop looking for outside factors that prevent the president from accomplishing what we want, and admit that Barack Obama might be accomplishing exactly what he wants.

What happened to Obama? He was elected president. All other answers are based more on hope than change.

Emancipation and (Self) Preservation

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It is perhaps ironic in the extreme to take to the internet to extol the virtues of contemplation, and to do so while discussing a story that, by the time you read this, will be over a full day old (a near-eternity in the blogosphere), but President Obama’s allusions to the Emancipation Proclamation (or more accurately, the release of a months-old talk where he praises Lincoln’s move as a marriage of principle and pragmatism) in the contextual crucible of the debt-ceiling debate, makes me wish we could really spend some time learning, relearning, and discussing the Proclamation and Lincoln’s actions in the context of his time and the lessons they might hold for action in ours.

It would be as fun as it would be enlightening for me (and a lot of others, I’d hope) to have a back-and-forth about what President Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation did and didn’t do—for slaves in Union and Confederate states, for the war effort on both sides of America’s Civil War, and for the future of the (as opposed to “these”) United States—because there is room for argument. And, it would be great if we could first pursue the pure knowledge and understanding before having to turn it into an ironclad metaphor for our current president and his very current “crisis” (another point open to interpretation). But Obama “went there”—first in a March talk with a group of students, and this weekend with the release of tape of that talk and another video alluding to the same issue—and so the metaphor, like a battle, is joined.

Because my preamble ramble is already closer to the pre-internet-age chat than I had intended, let me shorthand a lot of my thinking on Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation and say that while I feel comfortable in raising an eyebrow about just how few slaves were freed on its first day, January 1, 1863, and also feel comfortable in asserting that Lincoln understood the shrewd politics of the Proclamation’s exact language, a day of looking at recent scholarship on these issues also has me believing that “Emancipation,” such as it was proclaimed, did much to help the Union’s war effort by adding a second “cause” (the eventual abolition of slavery in addition to the opposition to southern secession) to the fight, by painting a stark moral contrast between the warring parties to European powers that had abolished slavery themselves, but still had other reasons to aid the Confederacy (such as Great Britain), and, quite notably, by allowing northern blacks and freed southern slaves to enlist and fight, swelling the ranks for the Union side.

All of this allowed Lincoln to attain his stated primary goal—the preservation of the Union—but it also (along with some very critical acts of Congress) laid the groundwork for the degradation of slavery in Northern slave states, the outlawing of slavery in US territories, and soon after, the passage of the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery across all states. (It also helped blunt any thoughts of a challenge to Lincoln’s re-nomination from the abolitionist wing of the Republican Party in 1864, which is interesting even in today’s context, and an attractive grace note to my point here.)

With all of this (all of this) in mind, let us now examine President Obama’s words, as delivered to a politically mixed group of students:

[Obama] noted that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation permitted slavery in border states loyal to the Union, in an attempt to hold the nation together.

“Here you’ve got a wartime president whose making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced because he understood that ‘right now, my job is to win the war and to maintain the union,’” Obama said.

“Can you imagine how the [liberal news outlet] Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, ‘Lincoln sells out slaves.’”

He told the students: “The nature of our democracy and the nature of our politics is to marry principle to a political process that means you don’t get 100 percent of what you want.”

Again, setting aside just how accurate the analogy is with respect to what the Emancipation Proclamation did and/or was intended to do, and trying, too, to ignore the gratuitous hippy punching, I want to focus on the last paragraph with respect to the broader invocation of Lincoln’s pragmatism.

Obama seeks to praise Lincoln for his ability to attain his goals in light of and in spite of both factional opposition and structural impediment, and in so doing, the current president rather nakedly implies that he is doing the same. Obama essentially says: “Lincoln married his principles to process and achieved his goal, and now, so too, will I. Someday, many will appreciate what I am doing the way we now appreciate Abraham Lincoln.”

But here’s the rub: What principle? And what goal? Obama’s big lesson, he says, is “you don’t get 100 percent of what you want,” but what is it that Obama wants?

I don’t think he is concerned about the actual preservation of the Union. Aside from a marginal group of racists and paranoids—and the small handful of opportunist politicians that will claim some common cause even if they intend to do nothing as noteworthy as a Jefferson Davis—few are expecting another war between the states. Is the president then thinking that the fight against America’s current economic woes is the moral equivalent of the fight to preserve the Union? Could be, but then how have his actions moved us closer to that goal? What principle is he marrying to politics?

Deficit hawking will do nothing to create jobs or consumer demand, and laying things his party holds dear on the table (or whatever euphemism Obama is using this week for offering up benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare) not only makes the personal economies of so many Americans that much more precarious, it does nothing—nothing—to affect the deficit, or, much more to the immediate point, the debt ceiling. This would not just be me saying this; this would be the vast majority of our nation’s economists. I would also wager big money that any of the president’s long trail of ex or soon to be ex economic advisors—from Austan Goolsbee to Jarred Bernstein to even (yes) Larry Summers—would agree: if your goal is to usher in a robust economic recovery, cutting trillions from public projects, social programs and so-called “entitlements” will be almost entirely counterproductive.

Is the “goal” compromise itself? Many, including myself, often feel this way. But what is that? How does that marry “principle” to “politics” when it defines them as exactly the same thing?

Which leaves me with two remaining possibilities—both unpleasant.

I am going to give short shrift to the sinister one—that Obama is a sort of “Manchurian Candidate” whose entire career was engineered for the goal of destroying the Rooseveltian welfare state and the Democratic Party that built and defended it. It might be true in practice, but the psychology and construction of this thesis requires more supposition than I am comfortable writing.

To me, it seems the more obvious answer is now the correct one—and maybe the sadder one, too: Obama’s goal, the principle and practice that the president is equating with the Emancipation Proclamation, is in fact his re-election. To Obama, the preservation of his presidency is the same as Lincoln’s preservation of the Union.

How else can we explain Obama’s “leadership” on economic issues, especially since the “grand compromise” of last December when he allowed the continuation of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy? What other “principle” dictates that the president insist on moving further and further toward a camp of greedy, rich corporatists and their Washington proxies? What “goal” is achieved by taking away from the president’s own party the one sure-fire electoral winner, the contrast between the party that protects Social Security and Medicare, and the party that openly has suggested cutting them?

These questions are even more pointed, to my ear, if we are to believe (as some keep insisting) that the president does not intend to make these cuts or move as far right as he might make it seem, but is instead just posturing to throw his opposition off balance, to reveal them as the more intractable. It is a posture that does nothing for Democrats in Congress (or anywhere down ticket, really), but it does, in the eyes of Obama’s political team, anyway, project the president as more “independent” and more appealing to some dubious grouping of “independent voters.”

Imagine, then, Abraham Lincoln approaching the same problem. Lincoln was not above politics—as noted, the Emancipation Proclamation was a shrewd document politically, and during Lincoln’s senatorial and first presidential campaigns, he would address slavery in very different terms depending on his audience—but it was politics toward a goal bigger than himself, and it would eventually come to be politics married to a principle that, even though not as enlightened as our current approach to race, still became steadfast in its alliance with the abolition of slavery.

Would Lincoln feel that simply positioning himself for a second term, giving his re-election the best of all possible chances, was the same thing as preserving the union? That one is a stretch for me. And, even though Lincoln’s initial indication of the impending Emancipation Proclamation (in September 1862) was bad for some Republican members of the House (they lost seats in the 1862 midterms), with the principle of abolishing slavery in hand, the president’s party was given an issue to run on that served them well in many places for the next 100 years.

Can Barack Obama look at his moves in the current “battle” and expect a similar legacy? He can want it, but history will be the judge. It will be, should the republic survive or no, the stuff of future discussions and scholarship. It is for time to decide, not Beltway strategists, not “independent voters,” and certainly not the president, himself.

(A version of this post appears at Firedoglake.)