Divider-in-Chief (9 page)

Later in 2012, Obama reversed course, sort of. Obama's rejection of Keystone XL provoked a strong backlash from unions, pro-business groups, and the public. A March Gallup poll found nearly twice as many Americans supported the pipeline (57 percent) as opposed it (29 percent).
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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada would look elsewhere, particularly to China, to sell its oil if the United States didn't want it. But rather than green light the critical infrastructure project linking Canadian oil with American refineries, Obama struck a compromise that pleased no one: a pipeline to nowhere. Obama's literal half measure involves constructing a pipeline from the Gulf Coast to Oklahoma—nearly 2,000 miles short of the Canadian oil fields. On June 15, 2012, the U.S. State Department announced it will conduct another environmental review of the proposed pipeline with the goal of making a decision on the project's permit next year.
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North Dakota Republican senator John Hoeven said an environmental review of the entire route was “unwarranted and unjustified in light of an already exhaustive four-year review.”
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He added: “Today's notice from the Department of State seems to be yet another obstructive tactic designed to appease a narrow constituency. With rising unemployment, a stagnant economy, and continued instability in the Middle East, the need for Congress to approve the project has never been greater.”

The Keystone pipeline would bring in more than 700,000 barrels of oil a day. According to Mario Loyola, a senior analyst at the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment, “Obama will soon be personally responsible for preventing some two million barrels per day of possible North American crude oil production from reaching the American economy. The U.S. currently produces only about six million barrels of domestic crude oil, so that would be more than a 30 percent increase in domestic production.”
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The president, Loyola notes, “is preventing the U.S. from increasing oil production by an amount nearly equivalent to Iran's total oil exports.... We are once again entering a period of scarcity, where slight fluctuations in demand or supply will have a disproportionate impact on gas prices—but this time the scarcity is largely the product of Obama's policies.”
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Obama's energy policies hurt middle class American families most. Energy companies raise their prices when the government sets up bureaucratic roadblocks and higher taxes. Most of the costs are ultimately passed down to consumers.

The story of Solyndra again illustrates how the Obama administration has placed election politics and narrow ideological and political interests ahead of the interests of the American people, particularly middle income Americans.

Solyndra was a California-based manufacturer of solar panels. George W. Bush's Energy Department first considered making a loan to Solyndra, but its review panel unanimously recommended against doing so. President Obama took up the cause as a centerpiece of his “green energy” initiative. In March 2009, the Energy Department made a “conditional commitment” to a $535 million loan guarantee to support Solyndra's construction of a commercial-scale manufacturing plant for its solar panels, with the promise that it would create 4,000 new jobs.
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The money came from Obama's $859 billion stimulus program.

After securing the loan guarantee, the Federal Financing Bank, part of the Department of the Treasury, loaned Solyndra $527 million.
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But career employees at the Office of Management and Budget cautioned against proffering the loan. One even predicted Solyndra would run out of money and head for bankruptcy court by September 2011.
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A Government Accountability Office report said the Energy Department had circumvented its own rules in order to make loan guarantees to at least five firms, including Solyndra.
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In March 2010 an independent audit by Price Waterhouse Coopers questioned whether Solyndra could survive as a business, and, according to internal administration emails, even administration staff and close Obama allies in the venture capital world warned the White House that
the company was a bad bet.
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Undeterred, Obama visited the company in a high-profile media event in May 2010, declaring, “The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra.”
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Solyndra executives were privately warning administration officials that they were at risk of going under, and that the company needed to lay off employees. But, according to internal emails, the Energy Department persuaded the firm to delay layoffs until after the 2010 mid-term elections.
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Solyndra was in dire economic shape, and in February 2011, the Energy Department restructured the loan, providing Solyndra $75 million more in taxpayer financing.
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On September 1, 2011, Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and fired all 1,100 of its employees. The company is now being sued by some employees who were abruptly let go.
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Emails between Solyndra and the Obama administration made public by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations made clear that political considerations, as the
Washington Post
put it, “infused almost every level of the decision-making on granting the Solyndra loan and later administration efforts to keep the company af loat.”
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It was also revealed that the company's shareholders and executives had made numerous substantial donations to Obama's campaign, that Solyndra executives had held meetings with White House officials, and that the company had spent large sums of money on lobbying.
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In fact, during the period when Solyndra's loan guarantee was under review, the company had spent nearly $1.8 million on lobbying.

In September 2011, the
Washington Post
reported that not only had the Obama administration continued to give Solyndra taxpayer money even after it had defaulted on its $535 million loan, but the Energy Department restructured the loans even after being warned that such action might be illegal.
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The Solyndra scandal won't dissuade the Obama administration from continuing to pursue its “green energy” agenda, and from placing narrow
ideological interests ahead of the American taxpayers' interests. In 2012, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said the administration won't “back off” its commitment to alternative and, as it turns out, often ineffective energy production. “This is going to continue being a thrust for us.”

In a campaign speech in Cleveland in June 2012, Obama said, “My plan would end the government subsidies to oil companies that have rarely been more profitable—let's double down on a clean-energy industry that has never been more promising.”
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But a June paper by scholars at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank, found that clean energy subsidies have been a waste. The paper claims they don't reduce dependence to foreign sources of energy, because many technologies favored by current policy—wind, solar, geothermal—replace coal and natural gas, in which the United States is already self-sufficient.

The paper also found that clean energy subsidies don't create jobs; they merely shift them around from one company to another. As Charles Lane of the
Washington Post
wrote about the Obama administration's green obsession: “If government does double down on clean energy, it's the federal budget that will end up busted.”
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Just another bill Obama is prepared to stick to taxpayers.

N
ot so long ago, young Americans swooned for Barack Obama. Obama's support among America's youth derived in part from his perceived coolness. He was young and biracial. He played basketball and listened to Jay-Z. He offered inclusive and uncomplicated slogans like “Yes We Can!” “Change You Can Believe In,” and “We are the ones we've been waiting for.” But there was something more. Obama appealed to that natural optimism and hopefulness of the young. His soaring rhetoric promised them something better: unity, transparency, no more finger-pointing. And he promised them, and all of us, a fundamental transformation.

Four years after Senator John Kerry won voters twenty-nine and younger by nine percentage points, Obama won them by thirty-four points—66 percent to 32 percent. What's more, 2008 saw two million more young Americans under age thirty vote than in 2004.

Obama didn't just win the youth vote. As Jonathan Alter puts it in
The Promise
, he “carried the future in a landslide.... All the canvassing and
college organizing and cool new web videos had paid off. The headline for those who followed politics closely was
generational realignment
.”
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Almost as soon as Obama became president, the veneer began to wear. Young people noticed the “I won, you lost” rhetoric. They noticed the backroom dealing over Obamacare, and the harsh partisan rhetoric out of the White House. They also noticed the world apology tour. And they certainly noticed economic conditions, far from improving as had been promised, careening downward.

More subtle, but still noticed, was Obama's attack on the American dream—their American dream. Obama's policies were attacking industry, hard work, ambition—the very characteristics they had seen in their parents and grandparents, and grew up respecting and emulating.

Early in his administration, Barack Obama addressed the graduating class of Arizona State University. It was May 2009, and he told the graduates:

Barack Obama was telling young Americans that striving for success, having ambition, reveals a “poverty of ambition.” Here Obama was doing what he does best: denigrating a group in order to create hostility and discontent. He was fostering a distrust of the ambitious and the successful, something we have seen the president do repeatedly—by encouraging the Occupy Wall Street movement and by attacking business. Obama was looking to rob young people of pride in success, and the honor of a hard day's work that is as American as apple pie.

Instead, he was hoping to make a different way of life more attractive—one where there is equality of outcomes, where government determines what is fair, and indeed where the most important jobs are not in the private sector but in the government or non-profit sector. In short, Obama was driving a wedge between young people and what has made America great.

All the while, President Obama has tried his best to maintain young Americans' enthusiasm for him and his presidency. Trying to prolong the rock star fascination he inspired among young people, he has appeared on high school and college campuses with astonishing regularity. He has promised young people free contraceptives; he's promised that “children” can stay on their parents' health insurance until they are twenty-six (although their parents have to pay for it); and he's pledged to forgive their student loan debt if they go into government-approved fields after graduating.

But neither Obama's “coolness” nor his handouts can compensate for the devastating impact his economy has had on young Americans.

The Obama economy has spawned a new term: the Boomerang Generation. It describes the millions of young people who have graduated from college in the last few years only to find themselves saddled with debt, unable to find work, and having to move back home with their parents. According to the liberal
Huffington Post
, 85 percent of 2011 college graduates had to move home because they were unable to support themselves.
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It is difficult to exaggerate the impact of the Obama economy on young people's job prospects. To convey just how bad it really is, Young America's Foundation developed the Youth Misery Index, combining youth unemployment, average graduating college debt, and national debt per capita. The Youth Misery Index under Obama has risen 20 percent, and it's only getting worse.

A 2011 Rutgers University study found that only about half—53 percent—of college graduates between 2006 and 2011 were employed full time.
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Twenty-one percent were un- or underemployed. Many others, frustrated after months or years of trying to find suitable work, had dropped out of the economy altogether.

According to a study by the Associated Press, in April 2012 more than half of recent college graduates were either unemployed or working in a job that doesn't require a bachelor's degree. The survey was conducted with the help of researchers from Northeastern University, Drexel University, and the Economic Policy Institute, based on data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and the U.S. Department of Labor.
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