I was as taken aback as everyone else by President Obama's announcement that he was preemptively caving on a major Republican demand in climate negotiations and expanding offshore drilling.
Until about an hour ago, and then it hit me.
Devilstower posited on the front page that there were three obvious possible reasons for Obama's 180 from the campaign:
- to actually benefit the US energy supply (foolish);
- to provide a negotiating position, either as a trade off for higher fuel standards or any other factor (bad strategy)
- to position any further action on energy as bipartisan (disappointing and foolish)
But there is a fourth possibility, one which most everyone seems to have overlooked and one which, frankly, is such a new concept in government that it makes sense we'd overlook it.
That fourth possibility is that President Obama doesn't really give a rat's ass about the GOP: he's more worried about Exxon-Mobil.
And in a post-Citizens United world, he's right to be.
Let's just look at two numbers.
First, 3.7: That's how much money, in billions, the Center for Responsive Politics expects will be spent on midterm elections this year.
Second, 19: That's how much money, in billions, Exxon-Mobil made in net profits in 2009, according to the company. That's not revenues, and that's not gross. That's net profit...and it was their lowest annual profit in the past seven years. Even in their worst year since we invaded Iraq, Exxon-Mobil still made enough profit to fund every 2010 federal and state campaign more than five times over.
Exxon isn't the only oil company out there, so I don't want people to think I'm picking on them exclusively, but they are the biggest dog in the pack. And their executives know that they can spend about as freely on the midterms as they'd like, and install the most climate-killing, carbon-emitting Congress we've ever had.
Sure, they can buy ads. But ads are easy, and there's only so much ad space to buy (call it the "Brewsters Millions" theory of ad buying: at a certain point, spending the money is more of a chore than anything else, since it's hard to do and you're not getting any immediate return on that investment). And ad space might be tough to come by: the Chamber of Commerce is claiming they're going to drop $50 million on ads opposing health care legislation, even though they say they don't even want to repeal HCR. But keep in mind that they spent over $120 million in lobbying in 2009, which wasn't even an election year! They have piles of cash at their disposal for ads, and they'll spend huge sums trying to defeat our candidates, and make races that should be comfortable wins into squeakers.
Exxon can not only buy ads, they can actually buy campaigns. Not in the sense of making candidates wholly-owned subsidiaries, but in the sense that they can contract for field, phone bankers, mailings, robocalls, radio spots, tv ads, billboards, lawn signs--anything they want to spend money on except direct contributions to the campaign itself (because heaven knows that last $2300 would be the difference between honest government and corporate control). They can take a know-nothing wingnut from the sticks and turn him into a full-strength contender overnight, manufacturing a veritable army of carbon-loving Doug Hoffmans ("Doug Hoffmen"?). They can free up GOP candidates' time by alleviating much of the need for fundraising. They can do everything short of directly coordinating with the campaign (but indirect coordination ain't that hard to pull off).
And that's just in the General--don't even think about what they can do to people like Bill Halter and Connie Saltenstall during the primaries. And remember, since they're at arms-length from the other campaigns, the incumbents in those races can just "tsk-tsk" for the camera as their challengers are eviscerated on the air, and then laugh all the way back to DC.
Now, I have no evidence Exxon-Mobil plans to do any of this. They might decide it's not their place, or that it'll harm their long-term interests. But when you've got a business that, at what's essentially its decennial nadir, still nets you $19 billion in profit, you're going to be damn interested in any potential regulations and legislation that might impact your bottom line for decades to come--what's a few billion now to protect hundreds of billions in the future if not a damn smart investment?
So in the future, when we see something President Obama reversing two years of promises and letting loose a greedy and irresponsible industry onto our nation's coastline, I'm not going to be able to tell if he's setting the policy he believes is best for the country, or the policy he believes is the best politically, or if he's just trying to keep the 19 billion pound elephant in the room from going on a rampage.
This is the reality of Citizens United. This is the political world we now inhabit.
When a corporation's moral compass points only to the bottom line, and its pockets are as deep as oil wells, it is inherently dangerous to our democracy and must be treated as explosive. When smart people say that we need to enact strict federal legislation and/or amend the Constitution to undo the damage that the Roberts Court has done, please, please take them seriously, and think very hard about how much you're willing to give, and how long you're willing to fight, to right this serious wrong. We're only going to get one shot at fixing this.