Biden is, shall we say, off-message:
Biden’s apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.
“No coal plants here in America,” he said. “Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make them clean.”
“We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.
The answer seems to play into John McCain’s case that Obama has been saying “no” to new sources of energy.
Notwithstanding Obama mentioning that he supports clean coal in his convention speech (“As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology,”) , but it has pretty clearly been part of his energy plan for as long as I can remember. In fact, the coal industry and UMW in WV has been pushing Obama’s support for coal (I have heard ads on the radio, but can not find any links online) and Obama has taken heat from environmentalists (another one of those fun things about being a centrist- taking heat from the left while getting labeled a far left liberal by Republicans).
Biden is just wrong, and this sort of nonsense could cost Obama and down-ticket Democrats in Appalachia dearly in November. In other words, shut up, Joe.
*** Update ***
And then there is this.
cleek
Oy. sounds like it’s time for a little re-education.
cleek
and, in the words of Digby : Also not helpful
Church Lady
How can Biden be expected to know campaign positions when he is busy rewriting history. I’m surprised to find out that FDR was president when the crash of 1929 occurred, and even more surprised that everyone was watching FDR explain the causes of the crash on their new TVs.
Is Hillary looking better yet?
cleek
better link…
Martin
Obama is pretty cagey on clean coal. It appears that he supported it, learned more about it and realized it was bullshit, but didn’t want to get hosed in the primaries and then layered an emission policy on top of it that would make clean coal effectively impossible to implement. So, he supports it if they can also do the carbon sequestration that he calls for, which would make it completely cost prohibitive.
It’s one of his policies that not only is wrong, but isn’t entirely honest either. Biden bottom-lined it correctly.
Obama unfortunately has a few policies like that which appear to exist solely out of political expediency.
Martin
It was a cheap shot. Biden got that right as well. Look, we can’t call on them to fight fire with fire and then complain when they rightfully declare that they don’t like fire. Pick one – either we fight hard and sometimes dirty or we get a principled ticket. The former might be more likely to win, but the latter is what we want to elect. You can’t have it both ways.
tBone
Oh, give Biden a break. So he makes a mistake once in a while – at least he’s clean and articulate.
Seriously, I’m surprised it’s taken him this long to put his foot in his mouth. If this is the worst gaffe he makes, we got off easy.
mightygodking
Bottom line: Obama has to be seen to be “for” coal, because the coal industry in a couple of swing states provides a fair amount of jobs and money and so forth.
However, coal is environmentally disastrous on a scale barely imaginable if we used it more than we do (and we desperately need to use it less). Without excellent carbon sequestration, it’s a disaster already happening (thank you, China). So Obama says “fine, we can have clean coal technology.” In a speech he doesn’t say “by clean coal, I mean carbon sequesteration,” because he’s not a goddamned idiot and doesn’t want to lose the election when coal companies start whining that their idea of “clean coal” is “regular coal, but we wash our hands after we handle it so we don’t have dirty coal-hands.”
It’s an election, and you can’t play fair all the time.
J. Maynard Gelinas
There is no such thing as “Clean Coal”. The problem is that all the technology to scrub carbon out of emissions is vaporware. It doesn’t exist. There may exist – some day in the far future – a viable technology to scrub carbon out of coal emissions and then package it up for storage in the seas or in geological fissures. It’s possible. But then, since such techology doesn’t even exist as a prototype in the lab, it’s not someone one should bet upon. Because without having a prototype, there’s no way to predict deployment or scaling costs. And without that, there’s no way to determine if so-called “clean coal” is even technically viable, never mind economically competitive against nuclear, wind, solar, wave, geothermal, and gas.
IOW: It’s all bullshit until proponents of “clean coal” can offer up honest numbers for a comparative analysis. Which they haven’t done. Now, why the fuck would you support “clean coal” if you have no idea what it would cost to deploy?
Brett
I’ve always wondered why Biden does faux pas – hasn’t he been in the Senate since forever? That’s a place of gentility – you don’t say “My colleague is a fucking inbred moron”, you say “I will have to respectfully disagree with my esteemed colleague with whom I have known for many years.” Shouldn’t that have at least forced him to clamp down on his mouth before it got him in trouble?
Paul L.
Even funnier from the link when Mccain pounced on the Biden’s remark “We’re not supporting clean coal,”, came this knee jerk spin.
Maybe Biden was just angry
cleek
can i just have a VP candidate who won’t do his opponents’ job ? if Biden had a problem with the ad, he should’ve kept his fucking mouth shut in public and taken his complaint to the people who made and approved the ad, in private.
honor’s great. love it more than anything. but Biden isn’t in a Mr Honorable contest right now. the emphasis should be elsewhere.
Jake
This is pretty weak sauce on the gaffe-ometer. First of all, if Biden’s going to say dumb things, this is the week to do it. Secondly, yes, Biden should know better, but this is an area where Biden and Obama disagreed during the primaries. An easy recovery here would be Obama pointing that out, reinforcing the reason he picked Biden.
Contrast it to the other VP, who’s apparently afraid to even get within shouting distance of a reporter. Chalk it up to a gutless press why that’s not a story in and of itself.
Ash Can
(points upward) I’m with tBone. I’ll take Joe Biden and his mess-ups over the Brand-X VP Candidate any damned day of the week.
(The link will lead you to a Politico rundown of Sarah Palin’s
ExcellentEpic UNAdventureFail.)Brian J
“Seriously, I’m surprised it’s taken him this long to put his foot in his mouth. If this is the worst gaffe he makes, we got off easy.”
Regardless of what you think of this mistake, I’m sure McCain will do something by the end of the week. Last week he placed Spain in Latin America, or something very similar, and it’s only Tuesday of this week, so actually have the opportunity for two headache-inducing comments.
If there’s a silver lining in this, it’s that Biden appears to be a smart enough politician to know that he’s goofed and will be more careful about this. Unless they fuck this up really, really badly, it’s going to be washed away, either by the first debate, or by some McCain error, like I said above.
John S.
McCain must be in a full-on rage every moment of every day, then.
Brian J
The comment about FDR being on television was dumb, but you can understand what he’s saying. And while Hoover was president when the market crashed in 1929, it’s easy to see that Biden was referring to the period as a whole, even if his words weren’t specific. I can see why conservatives would laugh at this, but most people aren’t going to come away with the impression that Biden has some silly mistakes. I’d guess that most people would take away what he’s saying.
JL
The other day somebody on this site mentioned a transaction fee. Although he did not state it in the same way, it seems that Barack agrees with him. He will not add additional fees until the banks are stabilized though.
DFD
Whoopity doo dah…This is a tiny faux pas and it will be off the radar within 5 minutes. The $700 billion Question will continue to overshadow anything else.
Dr. Squid
Bottom line: Obama has to be seen to be “for” coal, because the coal industry in a couple of swing states provides a fair amount of jobs and money and so forth.
Not to mention that there’s a shitload of high-sulfur coal in Central and Southern Illinois that’s useless for now until the problem sulfur can be removed.
Martin
A lot of us like Biden specifically because he calls them fucking inbred morons. Yeah, there’s a cost to that, but let’s be honest – we like it when politicians are plain speakers over issues that are appropriate. Biden calling Bush’s comments ‘bullshit’ certainly do cut to the heart of the matter in a hurry, don’t they?
DFD
In regards to the FDR slip, take a guess how many average Americans will give a shit much less be able to spell “anachronism”.
Jake
For the most part. It might get a bit more play than usual, if only because Team McCain is desperate for anything and everything they can use against Obama these days, to change the subject from the cluster-fuck that is their campaign. Look for them to raise it in response to questions that aren’t even closely related, as in:
DFD
In regards to the FDR slip, take a guess how many average Americans will give a shit much less be able to spell “anachronism”.
Stuck in the Fun House
Every now and then, Biden must undergo an Oral Pedectomy, or surgical removal of foot from mouth. My guess is, Obama expecting this, has got an OP surgeon on call,. Meanwhile, I’m not that worried about the Appalachia vote, it was mostly decided circa 1865, give or take a hundred years.
Tsulagi
Kinda sounds like Pat Robertson logic. You know, like when he supported abortion in China but not here. Jesus doesn’t live in China.
Walker
When I think of clean coal, I think of that town on I-81 in Pennsylvania. The one with the billboard that for a long time announced it was going to be home to the first clean coal power plant. The billboard that is no longer there.
In other words, as J. Maynard Gelinas said, it’s vaporware.
tBone
Only two? At the rate the McCain is going, I expect him to declare war on New Zealand and claim that he authored the New Deal by Thursday at the latest.
Go fuck yourself. [/Cheney]
cleek
there are plenty of “Clean Coal” billboards in WV.
Brian J
That might have been me, by way of Kevin Drum, by way of Dean Baker.
I must ask, where did you read this?
Birdzilla
Why dose BIDEN want to give all that to CHINA and not AMERICA? DIRTY LOW DOWN SIDEWINDING OWLHOOT ROTTEN HORNY TOADY
ricky
Biden chould be sent to Alaska to await the rapture.
Scott H
Clean coal technology pilot program. [BBC]
Of course, clean coal is like safe sex. There’s cleaner coal as there’s safer sex.
Coal power plants and coal mining aren’t the same thing. Selling US coal to the Chinese doesn’t adversely affect coal miners and the UMW, it would be a plus.
US Coal Exports.
ricky
Biden, chosen for his foreign policy expertise, seems to have put his Zapatero in his mouth on energy and economic issues.
DFD
Are West Virginia and Kentucky in play this cycle?
ricky
So Scott H. is suggesting Biden is for exporting coal like Palin is for exporting ANWR oil and gas.
oh really
Funny, that’s not the Joe Biden I know (and don’t love).
Expecting Biden to stay on message is like expecting Bush to tell the truth. It’s never going to happen.
With Joe you never know who’s going to show up, the articulate, mature guy or the diarrhea-mouthed, ego-maniacal fool.
Biden has this huge mouth with only, at best, an intermittent connection to his brain (which is of dubious quality).
I know, I know, he takes the train home every day.
Obama could have done worse in picking a running mate…but not much.
Stuck in the Fun House
Plus Biden is speaking as a New Englander that has experienced the downwind effects of burning high sulfur coal from the industrial midwest. Acid rain, dead fisheries, and too much asthma. And your right, the lions share of this coal has been sold to third world countries, mostly in Asia since the early 1970’s.
tBone
Which was kind of the point of the rest of my post . . .
Brian J
Don’t be silly. The surge, which McCain planned on one of the Blackberries he invented, was responsible for the New Deal.
Tsulagi
I don’t think I’d go that far. Not after Biden’s counterpart on the anti-Zapatero ticket demonstrated her energy expertise in this answer. That and her answer on the Bush Doctrine was sort of like watching Iraqi special forces doing jumping jacks.
tBone
Those Iraqi soldiers were really fungible.
Martin
No, but a nation that doesn’t want to see their electric bills double is in play. Hey, half of our electricity comes from coal. Let’s be real about that. And nobody thinks that we can just turn that off overnight. Personally, I don’t see how we can turn off coal without turning on nuclear, so I’m not completely in alignment with Obama on energy in a few respects. I agree on the goal, but not entirely on the means, which isn’t so bad.
Also keep in mind that WV, PA, OH are certainly in play, and while PA/OH don’t have a lot of coal going on any more, there are a shitload of dads and granddads that worked the mines back in their day and coal provided for them. They don’t see it as the problem you and I do.
khead
Two things:
1) “Clean coal” is bullshit. See earlier comment on safer sex. You just accept that it’s cheap, but dirty and then decide if you are ok with that tradeoff.
2) WV is not in play anyway. Really, it’s not. And no down ticket politician of any party is going to take on coal in Appalachia.
oh really
I realize that tBone. The comments weren’t directed at you, although I’m worried that you’re not clean and articulate. What you said gave me an opportunity to vent on Obama’s choice, which still disgusts me.
Virtually everything Obama has done since wrapping up the nomination has made me less enthusiastic about voting for him (but not less likely). When he brought Biden on board it really pissed me off.
You said if this is his worst gaffe we got off easy. I agree, but I’m not sure it is his worst gaffe. Fortunately, the media are mostly ignoring him. They’d much rather follow Sarah around and try to get her to say something…anything…besides her canned lies. Let’s face it, Sarah is such a buffoon that given a little slack, she could make the headlines on the Enquirer sound like conservative understatement.
The irony is that McCain’s most profound (laughing hysterically) statements uttered with his best Elder Stateman/POW gravitas are so ridiculous he should have been laughed out of the campaign long ago. Virtually everything he says is a “gaffe.” The problem is it’s also mostly GOP talking point garbage or “oldie but goodie” maverick crap and the media have been repeating that stuff for so long they think it’s all settled historical fact by now.
Svensker
But only as molecules.
D-Chance.
Don’t speak ill of the upcoming 45th President of the United States.
Of course, HILLARY would have never made those gaffes…
JL
Obama gave a press conference today and I only caught part of it on the CNN stream. I’ll look for a transcript but he said the first thing was to stabilize the market and the economy. He said that he would look at different options to reduce the deficit such as a fee for doing business on Wall Street. I was sanding and painting so the exact wording escapes me.
Jake
Oh Really, I’m just curious – who did you like for Obama’s running mate? I’m not convinced there really were too many better choices than Biden, but I’m open to discussion.
JL
All I can find are his prepared remarks. It was during the question and answer period.
JL
Jake, Biden has foot in the mouth problems but he also connects with the folks in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Biden can be a pit bull without the lipstick.
shmo
FDR contemplates his new Philco TV set with its big 1″ screen.
oh really
In today’s Democratic Party? Almost no one. The few people for whom I have any respect (e.g., Feingold) probably wouldn’t have taken it, were never going to be asked, and probably wouldn’t have played well to the masses.
As the convention approached, I actually thought Clinton would be the best choice — though the idea gave me an upset stomach and headache. I think there needed to be an ironclad agreement about Bill (I’ve had enough Bill for two lifetimes), but Obama could have turned the “he chose her out of weakness” around. In reality, I suspect he loathes her (I can’t blame him), but since he was on top of the ticket he could have demonstrated his strength by choosing and then controlling her. I mean that in a political rather than male-female way.
In retrospect, the choice of Clinton would have closed off many of McCain’s options. Sarah Palin would still be shooting wolves from helicopters and gathering foreign policy experience gazing at Russia, if Obama had picked Clinton. The whole women-for-Clinton-for-McCain problem would probably be non-existent. If that’s what Obama had done, I would have held my nose and accepted the choice as a political necessity. At least it would have made it harder for Clinton to maneuver with 2012 in mind.
In the end though, what I wanted Obama to do was create a little magic. I think he should have done what McCain did, except that Obama’s choice — a genuine surprise to really shake things up — should have been everything Palin is not — experienced, honest, accomplished, progressive. I don’t have a million dollars to do a search for that person (apparently McCain only invested $1.37 in his search and vetting process — the results tell me he got robbed). The reason Palin was so unexpected was because she’s so completely unqualified for the job. I saw a photo of her earlier today gazing across the table at Karzai. Presto! Now, she’s an expert on Afghanistan. Her little photo-op excursion to NY is so ludicrous that the whole country should projectile vomit simultaneously. Foreign policy experience is about substance, the opposite of what she’s doing.
I can accept that there really may be no such person as the one I imagined Obama finding and picking. The US is extraordinarily corrupt and degraded at the highest levels of political viability, but what Biden said to me about Obama was “change my ass, I (Obama) am a hopelessly conventional thinker occupying a fantasy role to help me get elected. I’ve got a foreign policy weakness so I’ll pick this guy to help with that.” The problem is Biden is no progressive. He’s got his name on some pretty sickening legislation and his mouth is not a minor, fixable problem. It is who he is. Further, he’s had more than one shot at national office and he’s never gotten anywhere — that’s not surprising, but neither is it an encouraging sign.
Sadly, Jake, there are very few Democrats I would even consider voting for (for any office) if I had any real alternative. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to avoid voting simply for the lesser evil. I’ve cast symbolic, third party votes (especially in safe elections) as well as unenthusiastic votes for mediocrities who were running against some Republican fascist. At this point, I’ve more or less given up hope. I don’t see any path from where we are to where I think we should be. This election I can vote for Obama or I can vote for one of the few people who have a genuine shot at making us nostalgic for George Bush — the Worst President Ever.
Justin
Dude, they shouldn’t advocate Clean Coal. It’s trash, but it’s fodder for the “populist” candidate. I want change–stop pandering to special interests. Fossil Fuels are garbage, no matter how “clean” they are. It’s a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. Seriously, the Sun (that huge fire ball in the sky that you can’t even look at) gives off a grip of juice. Drilling? Shut up. Harness it, and TRULY inherit the earth.
“Solar radiation along with secondary solar resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass account for over 99.9% of the available flow of renewable energy on Earth. The total solar energy absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850 zettajoules (ZJ) per year. In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year. Photosynthesis captures approximately 3 ZJ per year in biomass. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined. –Wikipedia
Come original.