Getting Back to the Future

Earlier this month, Jerome a Paris, one of the most respected voices in the progressive blogosphere on both sides of the Atlantic (he's the impressario of the European Tribune), wrote about the need for Democrats to talk about the Climate Crisis and energy issues in the current congressional campaign.

But the political conventional wisdom is that Democrats should ride their most popular issues into office, and then work on the Climate Crisis when they get there. Of course, that's never really worked. Al Gore didn't make it the centerpiece of either of his presidential campaigns in 1988 or 2000, because it wasn't supposed to be smart politically, and he lost anyway. And not having said a lot about it as a vice-presidential candidate in 1992 when he did win, it was not central to the Clinton presidency either.

Jerome and others make the point that only by making it an issue in a compaign will the American people be ready for action, and only a politician who has been elected largely on this issue will accrue the political power to make the massive changes and commitments necessary to really do something about it.

So it's really interesting what the acknowledged leader of the Democratic Party, who isn't himself running for anything, has said about this subject--President Clinton himself.

In his masterful speech the other day at the opening of The Center for American Progress-sponsored conference on The Common Good at Georgetown University, President Bill Clinton talked about the problems of growing economic inequality in America, the problems of outsourcing, the massive national debt to countries like China and even Mexico, and solutions to these and other problems. He mentioned the Climate Crisis, which is one of the target areas of the Clinton Global Initiative. In the question and answer period afterwards he said that even though he believed his policies aided the booming economy of the 90s, when the federal government erased its debt and created a budget surplus, and economic inequality declined, he noted that the engine of the private economy was the maturing of information technologies and their spread throughout the society and the world.

He said our economy needs a new source of good jobs and innovation. And he said what astonishingly few politicians are really talking about:

"So government policies can reduce inequality, but we also need new jobs that pay well. And the lay down, obvious, sitting here, slapping-us-in-the-face answer is to make a commitment to a clean, independent energy future. It will create millions of jobs, and many of them are not exportable."

He offered examples--and what he would do politically:

" I was in Denmark a couple of weeks ago. In the last few years their economy has increased by 50 percent. Their energy use during the same time frame increased by zero – nothing. They invested in conservation. They kept jobs. Their unemployment rate is about what ours is, but their wages are rising and inequality is going down because of a combination of new jobs and government policy.

Same thing happened in the U.K., the economy most like ours of all the European economies. They’ve had rising wages and declining inequality because they’re going to beat their Kyoto targets by 50 percent and they created all these new jobs in doing that. So whether its biofuels, conservation, wind, solar – you name it – we are making a big, big mistake not getting after this big time, not only because of climate change and national security implications, but because that’s where the jobs were. If I were here like I was 15 years ago as a candidate I would say to the American people, 'If you want to do this in a big way, vote for me; if you don’t, find somebody else because this is all I’m going to work on till I get it figured out.' Because this is just a huge opportunity."

Of course, with the Republicans handing the Democrats their best issues, particularly with the Mark Foley mess and all it represents, and all it says about Republican corruption and incompetence in Iraq, elsewhere abroad and at home--and with approval of the Rebpublican Congress in one poll down to 16%-- Democratic candidates would be foolish not to ride the tide.

But win, lose or draw, this must be the last election in which dealing with all aspects of the Climate Crisis isn't central to a political campaign.

We can't wait for the media to set that agenda. Though there have been a larger number of documentaries and major magazine stories in the past year, there is not that reality of daily coverage. It's always been a curious irony that the issue with the most importance in terms of the fate of human civilization and the planet as we know it is hardly ever talked about, either politicially or as the source of news stories.

But more importantly, we require leadership to create and set the agenda. It's a complex set of huge problems, and addressing the crisis will transform the economic and political landscape, just as ignoring it eventually will. The difference is that addressing it can transform us for the better.

So we're electing Democrats to stop the madness, to staunch the bleeding, to reverse this tragic, self-destructive course. But we did that in 1992, and it took 8 years, and then this nation allowed it to fall apart again. I don't think we're going to get more than one more chance.

This time it won't be enough to stop the madness. We will have to start the future. Right now the task is to elect Democrats to take Congress. And if they do, the next task will be to insist that they place this issue at the top of the agenda. Give them a few months to raise the minimum wage and stop the bleeding in Iraq, and reclaim our Constitutional rights. But then it's election reform, universal health care, and the Climate Crisis and the clean energy future.

I want to see Congress move on this. And in the 2008 campaign I want to hear a candidate say, if you want to do this in a big way, then vote for me. If you don't, then vote for somebody else because this is what I'm going to work on until we're doing it.