The Obama administration is abandoning its plan to immediately tighten air-quality rules nationwide to reduce emissions of smog-causing chemicals after an intense lobbying campaign by industry, which said the new rule would cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs, officials said Friday.
My response to industry would have been “Prove it.”
Politically, Obama seems to be writing off his own constituencies one after another. His unwillingness to fight the obstructionist Republicans has disappointed the liberal base as a whole, and this has infuriated the environmentalists. For what? For this?
Leaders of major business groups — including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute and the Business Roundtable — met with Ms. Jackson and with top White House officials earlier this summer seeking to moderate, delay or kill the rule. They told William Daley, the White House chief of staff, that the rule would be very costly to industry and would hurt Mr. Obama’s chances for re-election.
Like any members of those groups were going to vote for Obama anyway?
Obama is a huge disappointment. I’m gonna bet he doesn’t get anywhere close to the number of small donations to his campaign that he did in 2008, and I’m further gonna bet a fair number of “lean-Democrat independents” who voted for him last time are not going to bother in 2012.
I get angrier at Obama every day.