Premature capitulation

It’s becoming the theme of Barack Obama’s presidency. In spite of the passionate insistence of many on the right that the president is a zealous left-wing devotee, Obama has consistently approached the policy debates of his administration via premature capitulation after premature capitulation to the Republican Party.

And he does this despite the GOP’s clearly visible strategy of opposing anything and everything the administration proposes.

The latest installment in this narrative is the president’s recent decision to open much of the east coast south of Delaware and areas off the coast of northern Alaska to offshore drilling while keeping the coast of California protected.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that areas off the east coast might hold some 37 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 4 billion barrels of oil.

All of this is not to mention that expanding offshore oil exploration and drilling is a bad decision. Opening up thousands of square miles of ocean to oil drilling off the coast of the United States is a bad thing for all who care about the health of our planet.

What the administration should be focusing on is reducing our dependence on greenhouse gas and emitting less fuels like petroleum. Instead, it has decided to make the favorite mantra of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, “Drill baby, drill,” official U.S. government policy — something that even George W. Bush couldn’t get accomplished in his eight years in office.

The bottom line is this: It makes no political or rational sense to continually make bad decisions simply because the other side has proposed them in the past — especially when they’re not even demanding it at the moment. Some political pragmatism can be a good thing for a president; it can be used as a political tool to reach a compromise between the two opposing sides.
But when the Republican Party is walking in lockstep and refuses to support even what seems to be the most reasonable of compromises, it simply makes no sense to reward them with policies they like.

If the president were likely to win a few votes for the cap-and-trade bill in the Senate (or really, to get a single Republican vote on any major proposal) this decision might have been worth it. But the current extremist political state that has enveloped the Republican Party has rendered that possibility extremely unrealistic.

As the Republicans aren’t going to give an inch to the president no matter what he does, this new policy represents nothing more than a premature capitulation to Republican proposals.