Perino: Right on Energy, Wrong On Obama

Dana Perino, former Bush Press Secretary is quoted in Politico giving her take on President Obama's seemingly snake-bittern energy policy. The context and position of the article in which her comments are quoted is that President Obama had bad timing on agreeing to expand offshore drilling just before the BP disaster and on compromise with Republicans on nuclear power not long before the nuclear reactor problems in Japan as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. Okay, that's a bit unlucky. But luck often follows the decisions or non-decisions of those it affects.

Perino makes a great point on the nature of energy demand:

“None of this is risk free,” said Dana Perino, the former Bush White House press secretary who also worked in the Council on Environmental Quality. “If you want to have a BlackBerry and an iPad and heat in your home and drive in your car, and all the other things we benefit from based on the energy we extract, then you’re going to have some risk. That’s the way it is.

“Energy has to come from somewhere,” Perino said.

Where Perino goes off the rails is on letting President Obama off the hook far too easily.

“That’s not President Obama’s fault. There’s a disconnect that’s built up over decades.”

While it's true the disconnect is not Obama's fault, he's guilty at least of falling into that Utopian world view. It's evident in his insistence on green energy and his coming to the table late (if at all really) on drilling and even later on energy. While the timing could not be helped, the fact that more domestic energy is an imperative and his reticence to address it in a realistic manner, certainly are his responsibility. If he has indeed come to face the realities of national energy issues, he certainly has not brought his followers along by bringing him up to speed to the realities of national energy supply and demand. By insisting on green energy to play to his environmentalist base, he continues to exacerbate the problem. The President in no way deserves a pass on energy.