Pickens' Wind Plan Loses Support as Oil Prices Fall

T. Boone Pickens and tree-hugging environmentalists make quite an odd couple. The man who says he has lost his fortune three times over is betting on wind power as the next big thing in energy. But the constituency most likely to support his efforts -- liberal-leaning Democrats -- often distrust his former career and politics.

Pickens is, after all, an 80-year-old former oilman, who the Washington Post's Dana Milbank says lost over $2 billion dollars last year after betting oil prices would continue to rise when they actually sunk to new lows. In the past, he was a supporter of the infamous Swift Boat attack against Sen. John Kerry and voted for Sen. John McCain in the last presidential election. When HBO's Bill Maher pointedly asked Pickens last week how he could justify his new-found support for clean energy when he previously supported candidates with a background in oil and coal, he brushed off the question by saying he wasn't a politician and said he did not support McCain's candidacy except as Maher said, "in the voting booth."

The "Pickens Plan" has taken its lumps of late, including the easily defeated Proposition 10 in California, which touted clean energy and tax credits for the purchase of hybrid vehicles. Detractors pointed out that Pickens had more than skin in the fight and may have financially benefited by its passage. The lack of investors and public policies in favor of his plan also hurt his efforts. Last fall, the Wall Street Journal reported that at least 50 percent of Pickens' investors had dropped out because of falling oil prices and the realization that the economy was entering a severe downturn. With oil prices currently in the low-to-mid $40-per-barrel range, it is no wonder the perpetually positive Pickens is bullish on oil prices rising. Reuters reported last week that Pickens predicts the price tag for a barrel of crude to rise to $75 by the end of the year.

Last October, Google CEO Eric Schmidt visited the Commonwealth Club also touting alternative methods of reducing the cost of oil on America's treasury. Read the post here and watch the speech here.

Therein lies the twin ironies of the Pickens Plan, where the acceptance and transition to clean energies such as wind and natural gas are predicated on oil men with an eye on oil futures along with the support of Americans most likely to consume less "Texas Tea."

You'll have an opportunity to find out for yourself what this enigmatic and controversial businessman believes. T. Boone Pickens will discuss his plan to build the world's largest wind farm and how America can begin to limit its addiction to foreign oil next Wednesday, March 25 at the Commonwealth Club. Click here for more information.

Obama Adviser: Fundamentals of Economy are Sound

Christina Romer, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, echoed one of Sen. John McCain's most derided campaign quotes when she told David Gregory on yesterday's "Meet the Press," "The fundamentals [of the American economy] are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology," she said. "We know that -- that temporarily we're in ... a bad situation."

California residents can get a fuller sense of her interpretation of the health of our economy and how it will be affected by continuing government actions when Romer appears at The Commonwealth Club of California in -- we hope -- the near future. She had been scheduled to appear at The Club tonight, but she had to postpone the speech when government business came up. (Keep watching The Club's web site for a new date when it is scheduled.)

The administration looked to be using the Sunday morning and evening public affairs circuit to paint the picture of an ailing economy beginning to stir. In addition to the president's comments earlier in the week and Romer's assessment yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told "60 Minutes" the recession would "probably" end this year. (View the video here.)

A story on Fox News makes note of the similar language used yesterday with that of McCain's uttered just days before the fall of Bear Stearns last September. It quotes White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs making a hard-to-understand argument in the administration's defense, "there's a definitional difference between sound and strong."

When Romer comes to the Bay Area, maybe they'll have the definitions figured out.

Is the GOP Sending Coded Messages to Obama and Constituents?

The House passed President Barack Obama's stimulus bill last week, despite many Republicans intimating the honeymoon is already over for the new president (here, here and here) Senate Republicans are bracing for a fight with carefully chosen words. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) told reporters today that the Democrats are pushing debilitating legislation similar to what Herbert Hoover used preceding the Great Depression. "Hoover was very interventionist," said Ensign, "He raised taxes, increased spending, and tried very much to [intervene in] the economy."

According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Andrew B. Wilson, Ensign's comments correctly refute a myth about Hoover's earlier handling of the economy.

Hoover was an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment. This is critical to understanding the origins of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt didn't reverse course upon moving into the White House in 1933; he went further down the path that Hoover had blazed over the previous four years. That was the path to disaster.

While it is true FDR merely returned confidence to the public in his first 100 days in office, but did not stem the worsening of the economy until the outbreak of war in the 1940s, Ensign may be mixing apples and oranges relating 1933 to today. The GOP, instead, is using the gambit to harpoon the stimulus bill under the rubric of small government. "A lot of us would not like to have the level of government involvement," said Ensign.

Republicans strike me as having an uncanny ability to speak in codes. For example, in GOP parlance states' rights really means allowing sovereignty to each state to legislate divisively within race and gender issues. Sometimes the coda is mocked, such as when Sen. John McCain told an audience the "fundamental of the economy were sound" the same day Wall Street said it wasn't. Well, at that point, the fundamentals were anything but crumbling, but it spoke to conservative voters differently than to Democrats. The Nation argues that President Bush famously used the landmark case of Dred Scott, the 1857 decision that ruled that blacks could not become citizens, to the same effect. The loaded message, though, perplexed liberal and moderate viewers of the 2004 debate. It flew over everyone's heads except for evangelical pro-life supporters who equate the rights of slaves to the rights of unborn children.

Republicans may be in the minority today, but their voice can still be heard even if a portion of the electorate does not quite get the message.

–by Steven Tavares

Do you believe the GOP is using messages to their constituents? If so, is it effective? Is Sen. Ensign playing politics with Great Depression imagery? Join the discussion and leave a comment below.

Did Latino Voters Really Turn Red States Blue?

Conventional wisdom says Latino voters greatly helped Barack Obama become president-elect, but do the numbers back up such an assertion?

Frederico Pena, the former secretary of energy under President Clinton and mayor of Denver, told the Associated Press earlier this week that battleground states such as Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida would not have been won by Obama if not for the Latino voting bloc.

Poll numbers show voters backed Obama over Sen. John McCain by a 2-to-1 margin. McCain's 31 percent was significantly lower than the 44 percent President Bush garnered in 2004.

But, Mark Krikorian, writing "The Corner" blog at National Review, has an alternative view of the Latino vote's tangible power in this year's election.

According to the usual suspects, the benchmark in garnering Hispanic votes for Republicans is Bush's 40 percent showing in 2004. So what would have happened if McCain had matched Bush's performance, instead of the 31 percent he actually got? Based on CNN's exit polls, McCain still would have lost Nevada, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, not to mention, say, California and New Jersey. Conversely, even if Obama had won 90 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas, instead of 63 percent, he still would have lost the state. With the possible exception of North Carolina, where the results were close but the number of Hispanic voters is too small to register in the exit poll, there doesn't seem to be a single state where the Hispanic vote was critical to the outcome.

If the Latino vote didn't sway a single state one way or the other, what gives? Why are Latino leaders patting themselves on the backs and Republicans stressing over the loss of a group perceived to be "conservative-ready"?

The importance of Latinos voting in greater numbers for Democrats, along with their demographic growing larger and tending to be younger, in general, could portend great discomfort for future conservatives trying to win not only presidential electoral politics, but governorships in the West and seats in Congress.

An article at U.S. News indicates Latinos' switch toward Obama may have been part of an overall disillusionment by all demographics from eight years of President Bush.

Economic factors are on the minds of most Americans but may have hit Latinos harder. According to the article, Latinos are twice as likely to receive high-interest loans than whites, putting them at risk for financial upheaval in this tumultuous financial climate.

Disproportionately higher unemployment for Latinos may have also changed perceptions, as did the relative absence of gay marriage (excluding California and two other states) and abortion as issues to stoke latent conservative values Latinos tend to possess.

Luis Ricardo Fraga, an associate provost at the University of Washington and former Stanford University professor, will share his insights on the role of Latino voters in the 2008 election and the history of Latino voting patterns from 1960 to present, in a speech to The Commonwealth Club on November 19 at Morris Dailey Auditorium on the campus of San Jose State University.

The Global Election?

The front cover of the new issue of the British libertarian news magazine, The Economist, features a stark shot of Barack Obama under the words, "It's time." Inside is an endorsement.

It's only the latest in an avalanche of endorsements of both major candidates; it is, after all, the waning days of the seemingly never-ending presidential election. But this election and the endorsements reflect something new, in terms of a global interest in the U.S. presidential election that experts say is far higher than normal levels of interest.

Our friends over at CBS 5 have posted an interesting new report on this global election, and it's worth checking out. Columinist Frank Viviano (photo above) writes about this extraordinary interest, and notes that international polls "confirm an astounding level of overseas support – exceeding 70 percent in most nations – invested in Barack Obama, crossing all lines of race, ethnicity, history, religion and ideology."

Read more here.

Commonwealth Club members recently got a taste of international opinion about the United States when Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, spoke at The Club. Despite all of the talk lately about how America's reputation has suffered in the world, he found that majorities in every country surveyed did not see the United States as an enemy and did not expect a confrontation with it.

Will Americans agree with the international verdict in this election or will they go their own way? Find out on Tuesday ...

Christopher Buckley Won't Back Down

Christopher Buckley, the Republican apostate and conservative scion of the late William F. Buckley, is harboring little remorse after endorsing Sen. Barack Obama earlier this month.

In a humorous attempt to write Sen. John McCain’s concession speech in today’s Financial Times, Buckley continues to not back down from conservative critics who believed he shattered, as Ronald Reagan once said, the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republicans.”

Buckley, who spoke at the Commonwealth Club, Sept. 18, uses the satirical essay to illustrate the possible talking points Republicans might use for why McCain lost the election.

Among them, his early decision to cozy up to the religious right, the role of the media, and concerns about his health

On age, Buckley writes: “Looking on the bright side, it looks like I’ll get to go to bed a little earlier than I’d hoped to tonight.”

Choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate: “So let me thank Governor Palin for ... all that she did to me. For me, I mean. Little Freudian thing, there.”

On the same day of his appearance at the Commonwealth Club last month, Buckley seemed to telegraph his intention to vote for Obama at the Hoover Institute at Stanford three weeks before his infamous column in The Daily Beast, wishing him good luck, while adding, “give me a call if I can help.”

A Fishing Expedition with Senator Stevens

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), fresh from his conviction for concealing gifts from supporters, has vowed to fight on in his Senate career. Republican presidential candidate (and fellow U.S. senator) John McCain has called on Stevens to resign.

Stevens' history in Washington and his role in channeling funds to his home state, are legendary, and in the September 2008 issue of The Commonwealth magazine, Dr. Gloria C. Duffy wrote about her experiences dealing with the Alaska senator's "tithes" to his home state, even if they came from vital national defense funds.

We reprint her column below:

A Fishing Expedition with Senator Stevens
By Dr. Gloria C. Duffy, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club

In July, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, the powerful member and past chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was indicted in a Washington, D.C., court for apparently trading upgrades to his vacation home and favorable auto deals from oilman Bill Allen for favors he did for Allen’s now-defunct company, Veco. Now that Stevens has been collared, I can tell my story about him. Many people who have served in the U.S. executive branch have a Ted Stevens story.

Within the U.S. government, Stevens is legendary for inserting earmarks into virtually every piece of legislation to come before the Senate Appropriations Committee, guiding a portion of the funds to projects in Alaska. The “bridge to nowhere,” a pork barrel project for contractors in Alaska, has become the iconic representation of his craft. Stevens supports his constituents in Alaska by handing them chunks of the federal budget, and they support him . . . sometimes too well and under the table, apparently.

In 1993 I arrived at the Pentagon with a new job and an urgent mission – use $400 million in U.S. defense dollars annually to cause the former Soviet countries to dismantle their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons before they decided to become nuclear weapons states or the weapons made their way to rogue states or terrorists. As I reviewed my first year’s budget with my staff, I noticed a strange item, listed at $10 million, called “Arctic Nuclear Waste Assessment.”

I asked my staff what this was. They explained that it was funding a research project on the migration of nuclear waste from abandoned Soviet submarines in Arctic waters. It was conducted partly in Alaska and included employing Alaskan scientists measuring the presence of radioactivity in seal blubber along the Alaskan coast. What?!?!? I said. What does that have to do with dismantling weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union? We were supposed to be securing highly enriched uranium and plutonium, cutting up missiles, closing down nuclear bases, removing nuclear warheads. All that seal blubber measurements had in common with nuclear weapons aimed at the U.S. was radioactivity; a commonality without a connection. A naïve newcomer to the ways of the federal government, I proclaimed this a diversion of taxpayer money and declared that we would see that this item was removed from our budget.

The Pentagon staffers who had been assigned to me, veterans of many government budget battles, turned pale and began to quake. They pointed out that this was Senator Stevens’ project, which he had inserted into the Nunn-Lugar budget when it came before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and it was the quid pro quo for Stevens passing through the other $390 million in the budget. We didn’t dare object to Stevens’ project, they said, or we would risk losing the rest of the budget. They urged me to not even hint that there was a problem with his earmark. The senator’s staffers were fiercely protective of his earmarks and were likely to punish us if we raised any question.

I made another half-hearted attempt or two at eliminating this diversion of funds, which appeared regularly in each year’s Nunn-Lugar budget, before giving up. Thirty million dollars eventually flowed into this study, although it never found any evidence of radioactive pollution in Arctic waters.

The Arctic research project probably wasn’t the worst of Stevens’ earmarks, since to our knowledge none of it was paid to members of his family or came back to him as illegal contributions. But each year, the Nunn-Lugar program made its $10 million tithe to Senator Stevens, and that was $10 million less going into dismantling weapons aimed at the U.S.

Over the past four years, Senator Stevens has made 891 earmarks, channeling $3.2 billion to projects in Alaska, or almost $5,000 for each Alaska resident. Multiply this by hundreds of members of Congress and a similar interaction where executive agencies are afraid to challenge the earmarks for fear of what will happen to their larger programs, and you have the magnitude of this national problem.

The word on the street is that Senator Stevens will survive his indictment and trial to be re-elected by the citizens of Alaska. Given his largesse to his constituents, one can understand why. In truth, he is simply another victim of the way our political system is structured.

We can talk ourselves blue in the face about the need to change direction in this country, to shore up our infrastructure, protect our environment, reduce taxes, improve health care, make government more effective, and so on. But we are unlikely to see real change until we eliminate the way private campaign contributions skew our national priorities toward the needs of those individuals and groups who pay to elect our office holders.

Meg Whitman: Could She Save the Finance System?

Reacting to the ongoing struggle between Wall Street, Main Street, and the federal government, Republican presidential candidate John McCain recently mentioned that he would consider appointing investor extraordinaire Warren Buffett and former eBay president Meg Whitman to senior financial posts in his administration, if he is elected.

Whitman spoke to The Commonwealth Club on September 23, 2008, and in the video above you can get a sense of what her priorities and approaches might be if she were to be appointed Treasury secretary or some other economic post.

A side note, to all voters who watched last night's vice presidential debate in St. Louis between Republican Gov. Sarah Palin and Democratic Sen. Joe Biden: Meg Whitman was on McCain's short list for vice presidential candidates. How would she have performed in the debate if she had been chosen? Only she knows, but you can get an idea from her speech in the above video.

Whitman's speech was part of Orrick's A-ha Speaker Series at The Commonwealth Club, generously underwritten by Orrick.

Ralph Nader: Obama Banned Me from Debates

Just two days before Republican Sarah Palin squares off against Democrat Joe Biden -- and only days after the tops of the tickets had their own debate -- five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader spoke to The Commonwealth Club of California's Inforum about his own exclusion from the presidential debates.

Nader blamed Sen. Barack Obama for excluding him from the debates, saying that the Illinois senator refused to participate in the debates if Nader was present. Though Nader has a negligible presence in the presidential polls, he warned that the failure to include him in the debates was a significant reason why the issues Nader champions are not being exposed to the voting public.