Out of nowhere, for the first time all campaign, Democrats are talking about fossil fuel.
Well, sort of.
Instead of engaging with something useful like whose plan will stop burning fossil fuels the fastest, the Sanders/Clinton debate devolved into a tedious and boring squabble over exactly how much funding Clinton had received from fossil fuel donors over the years.
Should we include bundlers? Or no bundlers? Should we look at Hillary’s Senate funding or only her 2016 numbers? What about Bernie’s micro-drop of fossil-fuel low-level employee money?
You know what? Get a grip.
Neither side looks good in this “debate”. All it has done is pull both campaigns both off message and out of their stylistic sweet spots. If they want to win New York, they each need an attitude check, pronto.
First, the Hillary campaign. What has gotten into you folks this week? You started with smug directives to Bernie to “tone it down” or there would be no New York debate. Then you dropped all that, went back to negotiating a New York debate while showing the proper “tone” with a flailing crew of uncoordinated surrogates tossing around idiotic comparisons of Bernie to Dick Cheney and Joe McCarthy. Worse, Hillary topped off the week by losing her temper in an unplanned, unscripted and unhinged rope-line video rant at a Greenpeace activist that launched the fossil-fuel “debate”.
Whoa. What happened to the smooth, polished professional, always in control of every stage and every interchange? That’s the Hillary we’re used to, who commands respect and attention by exuding authority. No more rope-line rants, please — bring your A-game back.
Now, the Bernie campaign. You just had to go and squander a good thing, didn’t you? All week you were walkin’ on sunshine, with the news being just one miracle after another — from the Little Bird From The Gods to three Western blowout election wins to polls showing you up in WI and closing in NY to a $44 million March funding haul that dwarfed Hillary’s to an soul-stirring mass rally in the South Bronx. But now no one is talking about all that. Instead they’re going on and on about who called whom a liar, and who demands an apology and who won’t apologize. Back to the schoolyard!
Cut it out. You made your point about protecting Bernie’s integrity, but don’t insist on it any further. Pivot the conversation more aggressively to talking about actual policy to fight global warming. And stop being so testy and huffy — less bloviating about your wounded dignity, more photos of birdies and rallies.
Both candidates are honorable public servants and will work to move beyond the foolish bickering. They will check their attitudes, and give us substantive discourse the next 3 weeks. But once the fossil fuel funding claims are fact-checked and counter-fact-checked, we’ll all go right back to ignoring global warming. And that’s the real shame here. Fossil fuels should not be marginalized to the periphery of a goofy sideshow that only popped up because a candidate lost their temper for a few seconds. Stopping global warming should be at the center of Democratic public discussion, now. But it’s not and it won’t be any time soon. And for that, we all share a bit of the blame.