President Obama's Environmental And Political Pragmatism

The Bush Administration worked actively to obstruct states from setting up many of their own tough environmental standards, particularly insofar as carbon emissions are concerned. Given that the incoming Obama Administration was clearly more left-leaning in these regards, the question that consistent political observers tended to ask themselves was not whether or not President Obama would work to tighten and toughen environmental standards having to do with CO2 emissions, etc., but rather how he would go about the process of tightening and toughening them. We now have an early answer to this question (with more to come, I'd guess), and this answer is probably indicative of a savvy sort of political pragmatism that President Obama is at present applying to a number of items on his political agenda.

The new president did not, for instance, push for increased environmental regulations at the national level in his initial moves in this policy area. (He may eventually push for tougher nation-wide standards, but he's yet to do it.) Instead, he eased a number of Bush Administration obstructions placed on states that were designed to discourage certain states from setting their own tougher standards. (California is often mentioned as a state that might quickly work to establish its own tougher standards, perhaps even in the current economic climate.) That is, instead of raising national standards across the board--which might have proven to be a political liability, even in this increasingly "green" era, given the dire national economic outlook--President Obama has thus far left existing national standards in place and encouraged states to set higher standards on their own.

This is savvy from a number of perspectives. First of all, it appeases a solid chunk of the environmentalist crowd (at least for the time being) who abhorred President Bush's policies and wanted President Obama to take some quick action to counter them, while at the same time it avoids a lot of the "business-vs.-environment" fighting that surely would have occurred in this financially-difficult time had national legislation been proposed. (Business groups, large and small, may have soured quickly on the new administration if they felt they were going to be squeezed financially due to increased national environmental standards.) Secondly, it allows states in which stricter environmental measures are at present a popular idea to move toward setting tougher standards, which would tend to prove politically beneficial to both environmental groups in those states as well as the president himself, who will surely be listed among the reasons that such statewide-standards were able to be put in place.

Then there's this third pragmatic reason why such a move makes political sense: it doesn't hurt the president's popularity in states that would rather avoid setting tougher emission standards for the time being, because those states will be allowed (again, for the time being) to stick with the existing standards and avoid the necessity of raising their standards considerably, the latter of which would come as part and parcel of national legislation. So, let's say California raises its environmental standards, but for the time being Ohio does not; in theory, the president looks okay on the issue to a majority of people in both states. In theory, then, this is a "win-win" scenario at a time when the president needs to stay popular in order to more effectively deal with the national economy, foreign policy, and so forth.

Cynics from both sides of the political aisle may initially dislike this "wishy-washy" strategy, but to me it seems to come from necessity, political and otherwise--the president clearly wants to toughen environmental regulations, but he also knows that he needs to be politically careful for the forseeable future. For the time being, then, he's attempting a "middle-way" approach to the environment and several other policy areas, knowing that even very centrist policies will seem quite progressive in the wake of the Bush years. As to whether these policies will work in the long-run or will have to be altered sooner as opposed to later, we'll have to wait and see.