As Republicans assault the White House over new power plant rules, a top adviser to President Barack Obama told reporters Friday that climate change deniers will be in trouble if any is nominated for a national ticket in 2016.
John Podesta, counselor to the president and one of Obama’s top aides on environmental issues, issued that implicit warning to the GOP at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast on Friday morning.
“People who deny the existence of climate change or want to try to run suggesting that they aren’t scientists, saying they don’t get it and they can’t really say what’s going on around them. … I think that’s the losing side of the argument,” he said. “I’m certain that if you think about this in the cycles going forward, anybody who tries to run against this in 2016 is going to have a hard time running on that platform.”
“If you’re a climate denier trying to run nationally,” he added later, “I think you have a very hard road.”
He did acknowledge, though, that Democrats in coal-producing states — which include Senate candidates like Kentucky’s Alison Lundergran Grimes and West Virginia’s Natalie Tennant, who have criticized the rules — have a more difficult task ahead of them in 2014.
“There’s no doubt there are some states where this is an issue that presents… political challenges,” he said. More broadly, he added, Democrats are “going to have to make their own case to their constituents.”
Photo: Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor.
Yeah, just about 10-20 years before the rest of us, because, well…
In November 2016 the R party will be effectively neutered. They know it too.
This is a perfect example of the basic fatalism the Teabaggers have.
“Whaddaya’ gonna do?” is not a winning campaign slogan.
I’m not a scientist, but all the scientists are completely wrong.
Sure.
2016 won’t be kind to the anti-American right. By then all their lie created “scandals” will have been fully exposed as pure bovine excrement, Obamacare will be hugely successful, and the Hillay Wave will sweep the trash out of power in both houses of Congress. How they respond to that is scary to think about