Thank you. I agree.
Posted on 09/26/2010 4:30:53 PM PDT by jazusamo
It’s a measure of Carol Browner’s growing influence in the West Wing that she’s been given the coveted key to the taupe-accented kingdom — President Barack Obama’s personal BlackBerry e-mail address.
The administration’s so-called energy czar is just about the only high-ranking official to emerge from the BP oil disaster with an enhanced reputation — making her, some say, the most powerful woman in the White House next to Obama’s longtime friend Valerie Jarrett.
Yet even as Browner’s stock rises, her rationale for remaining by Obama’s side is declining. The collapse of the administration’s comprehensive climate change effort — a career-long goal for Browner — has stoked rumors that she’ll head for the exit rather than settle for an incremental, vastly scaled-back energy agenda.
And some environmental advocates, deeply disappointed that Browner didn’t have enough clout to push climate change to the top of Obama’s agenda, blame her for the debacle. “The real challenge at the top is, Carol Browner is not a strategic thinker,” griped one environmental advocate with close ties to the administration.
“It makes a lot of sense for her to go,” said another top environmentalist, who thinks Browner has been pragmatic but also the most committed friend of the greens in the West Wing. “If you were her, would you stick around to watch your dream being dismantled?”
Browner brushed aside — but didn’t completely rule out — an early departure in an interview with POLITICO. “I'm enjoying what I do . . . I don't have any date [to leave],” said Browner, who served a bruising eight years as head of Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency, the longest tenure of any Clinton Cabinet official.
Browner, who briefly considered a Senate run in her native Florida back in 2000, has no taste for elective office these days but is at no loss for private-sector options. During the Bush administration, she served on the boards of green nonprofits while earning a handsome living as an environmental adviser to private companies as a founding member of The Albright Group.
If Browner decides to stay in the White House, she can expect a bureaucratic slog — one senior administration official said there’s only “a tiny chance” the Senate will take up the comprehensive climate change bill during the lame-duck session. And Democratic leaders have even less ambitious ideas for climate over Obama’s next two years, assuming they’re even controlling Congress.
Obama aides said the loss of Browner would be a serious blow at a time when Obama is looking to recalibrate his energy agenda and defend against coming attacks. Besides, she’s one of the few Clinton veterans the president genuinely trusts — with Obama often taking Browner’s side during internal policy debates.
Browner, brought on board by Obama Transition Director John Podesta, talks with the president almost daily and e-mails him even more frequently. In addition, she is one of only three or four female staffers who regularly attend chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s 7:30 a.m. meeting, along with a dozen or more male officials, aides said.
Many environmentalists, too, would be sad to see her go, as would feminists who decry the paucity of women in Obama’s inner circle. Add to that a small handful of Senate Republicans who hint at revisiting climate change once the polarizing midterms have passed.
“I heard, by reputation, she was some environmental wacko, but I didn’t find that at all,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who pulled the plug on bipartisan talks over the summer.
On the other hand, a Browner departure would be the gladdest of tidings for industry lobbyists who think she is a green zealot like her former boss Al Gore.
And while she’s managed to insulate Obama from the wrath of many environmentalists on the left — one of them referred to her as the president’s “green Teflon” — some say Browner and the White House legislative affairs team erred by refusing to negotiate a scaled-back deal when prospects of a bigger cap-and-trade bill evaporated for good earlier this spring.
“They never had a legitimate legislative strategy to get 60 votes in the Senate,” said an environment expert who worked with Browner in the Clinton administration. “The consequence of that is the policy they really do believe in has been damaged beyond recognition politically.”
Union of Concerned Scientists President Kevin Knobloch said he’s not sure why Obama and Browner didn’t release a written plan to drive the climate debate. “I personally don’t understand why it wasn’t translated into, early on, a legislative outline that then leadership in the House and Senate could work from,” he said.
Browner has just as many defenders. Brian Wolff, director of communications at industry group Edison Electric Institute, was impressed by her tenacious lobbying in June 2009 during the House climate bill vote. Wolff said he was surprised Browner exhibited a similar level of intensity during a meeting with utility CEOs this summer, when the effort was on the verge of being declared dead.
“She’s very methodical; she’s very to the point. Some people are offended by it. But I think it’s her biggest strength,” added Wolff, a veteran Democratic operative.
Those traits served Browner well when the administration scrambled to cope with the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. White House insiders said that Obama and Emanuel were deeply frustrated by bureaucratic tangling during the first days of the spill and felt that the response needed a strong, centralized command based in the West Wing.
The 54-year-old University of Florida graduate, who had no real background in emergency management, was involved from the start, as was Jarrett, who handled the sensitive issue of how to deal with local officials highly critical of the federal response.
But aides said it was only after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson proved unable to coordinate the massive interagency effort that Obama and Emanuel tapped Browner to quarterback.
“She knew how to put together all the pieces,” said an administration official involved in the talks.
Browner filled another void as a spokeswoman who could reassure the American public at a time when no one knew how long the spill would last — or how dire the environmental and economic consequences would be.
The Miami native, who once snorkeled in the Florida Keys when she was eight months pregnant, comes across as approachable but unflappable on TV. But she flinched when White House staffers informed her she had been booked for the May 30th Sunday morning shows.
Browner spent two days nervously honing her message -- and dragooned her staffer Jake Levine for beer, leftovers and a mini-murder board session.
After it was over, White House officials, from Obama on down, told Browner she had struck the right tone.
At the time, Browner had wanted, perhaps naively, to turn the BP spill to her advantage, hoping it would jump-start the moribund climate change bill in the Senate. It didn’t happen.
“People just weren’t talking about it,” she said. “The vast majority of people — it really surprised me — they moved on very quickly.”
With no forward momentum, Browner is now forced to play defense.
In the short term, her energy will be consumed fighting off challenges to EPA’s authority for writing climate-themed rules in the absence of congressional action.
And she has already assembled a to-do list for the end of this year and 2011: new emissions standards for tractor-trailers and large trucks, a series of EPA rollouts and a bipartisan legislative push to enact new national standards for renewable energy, a move backed by some industry and environmental groups.
A year ago, Browner and the small green team she oversees in the Old Executive Office Building had much more ambitious goals. But she lost her first and most important battle on climate change early in Obama’s term, when the president and his brain trust, including her old friend Emanuel, pushed comprehensive climate change to the back of the legislative queue, behind the health care reform effort.
“The clock ran out,” she said. “You had health care taking far longer than anyone anticipated.”
Browner and her aides flatly refuted a report that Emanuel scuttled her plans to draft a set of legislative principles, a charge leveled in Bloomberg Businessweek Deputy Editor Eric Pooley’s book “The Climate War.”
But that hasn’t quelled the what-if speculation by embittered environmental activists, who say Browner’s strategy — which included generous deals on nuclear power loan guarantees and the lifting of the offshore drilling moratorium — didn’t result in a single GOP defection to the legislation.
For Browner, the setbacks evoke a “Groundhog Day” feeling. She had Bill Clinton’s superficial commitment to climate policies in the early 1990s but had to fight for attention amid Hillary Clinton’s disastrous health care reform push.
In 1994, newly minted House Speaker Newt Gingrich made systematic attacks on the EPA, with no fewer than 16 legislative “riders” to defund or derail Browner’s regulatory agenda.
“This is somewhat reminiscent to me” of the ’90s, she said of the current mood. “It feels very similar. You’ve got a lot of attacks on ... the use of the regulatory authorities.”
Instead of folding, Browner dug in. She proposed the most sweeping air pollution regulations in her agency’s history, cannily using authority that bypassed the GOP-controlled Congress.
A decisive moment of Browner’s career came during an Oval Office meeting when Clinton canvassed a handful of advisers to see if they backed Browner’s smog and soot regulations.
Clinton’s economic and political advisers had just finishing trashing her plans, when Clinton shouted, “What do you think?” to Emanuel who was walking into the room.
Emanuel paused, then blurted out, “I agree with her.”
Clinton eventually backer Browner and she, in turn, never forgot the favor Emanuel did her.
In 2002, when Emanuel was locked in a tough Democratic primary against Illinois State Representative Nancy Kaszak for a Chicago House seat, Browner campaigned for him, despite opposition from women’s groups, including EMILY’s List.
Later, a puzzled Emanuel approached Browner to ask why she was so dedicated to his cause.
A Democrat who worked on the campaign said that when Browner recounted his role in the EPA debate, Emanuel shrugged: He’d nearly forgotten the whole episode.
Don't bet on it, she's an enviro nazi and Graham isn't much better, they both need to leave Washington.
After her years as a Clintonista, she had no business being invited back to Washington. Browner is an enviromentalist wacko.
Sen. Lindsey Graham is a pussy. And an Obozo suckup. He must be compromised by someone on the left.
Graham must go when he is up for re-election.
Philip Dru, the Administrator; she's been there and done it; Obama will use her,she's not leaving the White House.
"..Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible... How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false...At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. ...We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast." ~ Michael Crichton, September 15, 2003 Environmentalism as Religion
Good post and thanks for the link.
Crichton is dead on the money about Browner and the EPA. They play to the emotions of the uninformed just as most every environmental and animal rights group does. They cherry pick a seed of truth on an issue and proceed to broaden it by supporting it with lies.
Thank you. I agree.
Excellent article!
I wonder when Jarrett is leaving.
It is! And here's a bigger excerpt to expand that bottom line:
"...The next few years are going to be very interesting. Watch the global power elite squirming to reposition itself as it slowly distances itself from Anthropogenic Global Warming (”Who? Us? No. We never thought of it as more than a quaint theory…”), and tries to find new ways of justifying green taxation and control. (Ocean acidification; biodiversity; et al).
You’ll notice sly shifts in policy spin. In Britain, for example, Chris “Chicken Little” Huhne’s suicidal “dash for wind” will be re-invented as a vital step towards “energy security.”
There will be less talk of “combatting climate change” and more talk of “mitigation”. You’ll hear enviro-Nazis like Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren avoid reference to “global warming” like the plague, preferring the more reliably vague phrase “global climate disruption.”
And you know what the worst thing is? If we allow them to, they’re going to get away with it.
Our duty as free citizens over the next few years is to make sure that they don’t.
Al Gore, George Soros, Bill Gates, Carol Browner, John Holdren, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Tim Yeo, Michael Mann, Ted Turner, Robert Redford, Phil Jones, Chris Huhne, John Howard (yes really, he was supposed to be a conservative, but he was the man who kicked off Australia’s ETS), Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Yvo de Boer, Rajendra Pachauri….The list of the guilty goes on and on.
Each in his own way – and whether through ignorance, naivety idealism or cynicism, it really doesn’t matter for the result has been the same – has done his bit to push the greatest con-trick in the history of science, forcing on global consumers the biggest bill in the history taxation, using “global warming” as an excuse to extend the reach of government further than it has ever gone before.
It is time we put a stop to this.
In the US, the Tea Party movement is showing us the way.
We need to punish these dodgy politicians at the ballot box. We need to ensure that those scientists guilty of malfeasance are, at the very least thrown out of the jobs which we taxpayers have been funding these last decades.
We need to ensure that corporatist profiteers are no longer able to benefit from the distortion and corruption of the markets which result from green regulation.
We need a “Global Warming” Nuremberg."
Browner is well named, in that every thing she touches turns brown.
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