Is a sustained, good faith bipartisan conversation about rail safety too much to ask for?
Historian Douglas Brinkley had a capital idea on Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast the other day regarding the Norfolk Southern environmental disaster. He proposed that Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown — up for re-election in 2024 — should be the administration’s point man on Ohio’s ecological disaster. He has already proven his loyalty, saying he would not “run away” from Biden, despite the fact that he is running for re-election in a red state where the President is unpopular. While the Biden administration has been magnificent on climate change it has been “slow in Ohio,” according to Brinkley. Secretary Buttigieg came after the Trump photo op and may have lost his political capital in Ohio. Biden and Harris were both notably absent in Palestine in the immediate aftermath of the train derailment, but conspicuously present at the Munich Security Conference.
Clearly Trump waged war with government regulations during his Presidency. He announced it publicly for all the world to see. But Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post has concluded that those rollbacks — so far, at least — cannot be blamed for the Ohio train derailment that has left tens of thousands of animals dead and untold environmental consequences. Incidentally, Sudiksha Kochi of USA Today concluded the same thing. Deregulation is a bipartisan sport, although it must be said that the Republicans have taken it to the next level. "Republicans, of course, have no serious proposals about how to prevent train derailments. That would involve complicated policy details and reducing the profits of oligarchs, perhaps their two least favorite things on Earth," writes Ryan Cooper in The American Prospect.
The administration made an unforced domestic error in not responding in the 48 hour window. Biden, who was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for decades, put so much attention and detail into his trip to Kiev last week that he was somewhat blindsided by the horrible environmental events unfolding domestically in East Palestine, a red but convertible state in the 2024 election run-up. And, as Brinkley noted on Fast Politics, it became an “environmental flashpoint.” Worse, Trump, seeing on opportunity, took advantage of the lack of administration presence on the ground in Ohio and somewhat changed the narrative from deregulation and environmentalism towards, of course, anti-government populism.
Environmental flashpoints are becoming more and more common at the national level. Brinkley referenced two recent environmental flashpoints — the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the 2010 BP oil spill. In the case of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, Richard Nixon had been President for only eight days. He was caught entirely flat-footed. Nixon sent in his Interior Secretary Walter Hickle -- a former Alaska Governor -- to survey the environmental damage and report back. In the beginning, Nixon began saying that the effects of the spill were small, but after Hickle got back from the beaches he warned Nixon, sharply, to not minimize the spill. “Hickle got ahold of Nixon,” Brinkley explained. “Do not minimize. It’s a disaster. Do not minimize. And Nixon listened to that and … avoided the blame for the spill.” And by 1970, Nixon had become a born-again environmentalist.
NPR remembered the politics of the spill on its 50th anniversary, in 2019:
The spill received enough media attention that President Richard Nixon made a trip to survey the damage in a helicopter. He also visited an oil-soaked beach near Santa Barbara Harbor.
Nixon spent his time on the beach "walking around gingerly" to avoid stepping on the sticky blobs of oil, McGinnes says.
The oil killed thousands of birds and an unknown number of sea mammals. Hundreds of oiled birds that were still alive were taken to the Santa Barbara Zoo, which is just a few steps from the beach.
The BP oil spill under Obama is another example of Presidents having a curious political blind side regarding environmental disasters.
Then-President Barack Obama visiting the oil-hit Louisiana coast. (Photograph: Win McNamee/pool/EPA)
It is, to be sure, thoroughly unglamorous work for a Chief Executive, walking along a beach in melancholy, avoiding oil clusters. Picking at the sand. Inspecting the damage to American shores. Powerless against the larger geological forces of nature infringed upon by capitalism. And like Nixon, Obama was reluctant to be on the ground in the critical 48 hours following an environmental disaster. The Guardian in 2010 covered the moment:
The ordinarily unflappable president, reported the Washington Post, cut off a briefing by aides in the first week after the Deepwater Horizon cut down with a terse command: "Plug the damn hole."
A month later, and with the hole still unplugged, Obama is being forced to show he is in personal command of the environmental crisis. He is expected to impose tighter new controls on offshore oil drilling tomorrow, following up the announcement with a visit to the Gulf on Friday.
The step-up in personal engagement comes amid signs that the US public is redirecting some of its anger at the spill from BP and the oil industry towards his administration. The slow-motion nature of the disaster – with crude only reaching the shores in significant quantities this week – has emboldened political opponents to try to capitalise on the seeming powerlessness of Obama and BP to cap the spill.
It took President Obama about a month to visit the Gulf. And while, of course, Obama had nothing to do with the actual BP oil spill, public opinion turned against him for not appearing to be on top of the situation, with boots on the ground, as the days turned to weeks. Nixon avoided the appearance of minimizing the damage, Brinkley argues, because he responded publicly soon afterwards. The Biden administration, like Obama, unfortunately, did not.
Senator Brown is not the perfect point person, but he is quite beloved in the Buckeye State. There is probably not a single Democrat with higher approval ratings than Brown in Ohio. Though the Senator is presently being lambasted by the right-wing press for fundraising, which is one of the necessities of our inequitable political situation, he is on a flight path to re-election. And Brown is a phenomenal explainer on all things industrial economics, labor and environment. And like the President he received his graduate degrees at Ohio State, not at the ivy league. In a perfect world, Pete Buttigieg — or, ideally, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — would have been a perfect point-person on the issue, but the time has almost certainly passed. The administration has lost a lot of the good will of the people by falling out of the 48-hour window and allowing the Trump virus to fill the vacuum.
Biden is now damage-control mode. And Senator Sherrod Brown is the best person to make the administration’s case on why his prioritized environmental positions are better for the people of Ohio to combat corporate greed than the alternative, the Trump-Vance grievance-based approach to just about every damn thing.
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