https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-climate-test-11556220873
Former Vice President Joe Biden (D., Del.) is running for President again. And one of Donald Trump’s 2016 rivals thinks that Mr. Biden is the most formidable of the potential 2020 rivals.
The website Mediaite notes that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who ran against Mr. Trump in the last round of Republican primaries, sees a potential GOP problem in the Midwest:
“Someone who could give [Trump] a run is Joe Biden,” Christie said while on journalist Tina Brown‘s podcast TBD this week. “I say that is because in essence [the 2016] election was decided by 80,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and most of those voters were white working-class voters.”
“I think if you look at the 19 candidates on the other side of the aisle the one who can best have an opportunity to appeal to those white working-class voters is Joe Biden,” he added.
Seizing this opportunity will require, among other things, that Mr. Biden persuade such voters that although he sees climate change as an enormous threat, he doesn’t want to abolish the carbon economy that employs so many of them. He will also need to persuade Democratic activists to accept less than radical solutions.
Many of his rivals for the party’s nomination have already signed up for radicalism. Emissions abolitionists who have co-sponsored the “Green New Deal” include every one of the senators running for President. The proposal is not designed to appeal to working-class voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, though it promises government assistance for those it puts out of business. Last month, Jessica Chasmar reported in the Washington Times:
Big labor has come out swinging against the Green New Deal, with the AFL-CIO claiming the sweeping energy and economic reforms proposed by Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could cause “immediate harm to millions” of union workers.
The largest federation of unions in the country sent a letter to Mr. Markey and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez last week, saying the Green New Deal resolution makes promises that are “not achievable or realistic.”
This is the central tension within the Democratic party, with leaders presenting themselves as committed to both income equality and reduction of net greenhouse gas emissions ultimately to zero. Emitting industries are often champions of blue-collar wage gains.
Patrick Thomas reported this week in the Journal:
Oil-and-gas drillers and refiners had some of the highest-paid median workers in the energy and utility sectors in 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal analysis of annual pay disclosures for hundreds of big U.S. companies as provided by MyLogIQ.
Houston-based Phillips 66 paid its median worker $196,407, the highest of any company in the sector.
Phillips was followed by Anadarko Petroleum Corp. at $183,445.
Oil giant Exxon Mobil , which has roughly 72,600 employees, according to its latest proxy, had the third-highest median worker pay with $171,375.
As Mr. Biden seeks to win over people who mine, make and move stuff, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Donna Brazile says that blue-collar voters will be comfortable with the Obama-Biden environmental record. She notes the Paris climate accord and efforts to transition to alternative energy sources.
The Obama environmental agenda was not as ambitious as the Green New Deal’s overhaul of American society, but Mr. Obama’s government still issued record amounts of regulation. Economic growth was slow. And if blue-collar voters were satisfied with the Obama green agenda, why in 2016 did so many of them vote for a man who rejected it?
