We’ve talked quite a bit on Castle’s failure to recognize the threat of the Tea Party and Christine O’Donnell. Castle’s failure is a lot more than just campaign rust. Castle did nothing while the Republican party became more and more extreme. Here’s a case in point:
Cap-and-trade is an environmental program intended to reduce greenhouse gases by allowing polluters to trade permits for emissions in ways that benefit cleaner industries and help those businesses needing more time. But cap-and-trade became an unlikely rallying cry for O’Donnell supporters during her campaign.
Joseph Cooper, a Johns Hopkins University professor and a member of the Annenberg Foundation’s Institutions of Democracy Project, that cap-and-trade legislation became a symbol and rallying issue for groups unhappy over the economy and government mandates.
Conservative talk-show hosts and conservative publications hammered at the issue in recent weeks, making points that resonated with conservative voters. They identified Castle as the poster child for cap-and-trade.
“You have an economy that’s in serious trouble and they’re talking about taxing utilities and raising costs for benefits that are disputable,” Cooper said. “If the country were in good shape, maybe there would be a more balanced discussion. The problem is people are suffering out there, and the realities of what people confront in their daily lives overcome media debates.”
That idea took root in Delaware and was frequently mentioned as a top issue by O’Donnell supporters questioned about their votes Tuesday.
Yes, Castle was defeated by cap and trade. Republican voters cited it as their top concern. The cap & trade program was a fairly small-scale program to reduce emissions by allowing corporations to buy permits to release pollutants, and those permits would decrease the total amount allowed to be emitted slowly year by year.
Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change.
Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it. President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it.
That sounds like something Republicans should support! Don’t they supposedly love the “free market?” It was a Republican idea!
The idea began as a middle-of-the-road Republican plan to unleash the market to reduce power plant pollution and spur innovation. But when lawmakers tried to apply the concept to the far more pervasive problem of carbon dioxide emissions, it ran into gale-force opposition from the oil industry, conservative groups that portrayed it as an economy-killing tax and lawmakers terrified that it would become a bonanza for Wall Street traders and Enron-style manipulators.
Mike Castle sat back and did nothing while his own party demonized the idea of cap & trade. They turned it into “cap & tax.” In fact, Republicans are now completely opposed to doing anything about the environment and all GOP candidates this cycle are global warming deniers.
What did Mike Castle do to stop this? Did he ever stand up and give a speech about how important this is? Or did he do his usual “they have a point” go-along-to-get-along shtick? Mike Castle thought the legislation was important enough to break with his party but not enough to stand up to them. Unfortunately we all lose when extremists run the show.