Lots of questions this week on why John McCain is ditching his green credentials and environmental strategy to deliver a mix of messages to the American public.
Earlier in the week Grist and Politico both commented on the launch of McCain’s new environmental TV ad coming on the same day as his call for the lifting of restrictions on offshore drilling (this to an audience of Big Oil in Houston). Commenting on this, Lester Feder at the Huffington Post suggests that:
McCain’s wholesale abandonment of a month-long environmental PR strategy is more than a knee-jerk response to a new peak in oil prices. It is a sign that the McCain campaign’s efforts to define the 2008 election narrative are in disarray.
And Feder quotes a number of political commentators who see this reversal as McCain “grasping at straws” to re-focus his campaign on the economy, in line with American voters’ views.
But I wonder if, at some deeper lever, McCain and his campaign are ingrained into an incoherency (it’s in the title of Feder’s article) that won Bush the last (two?) elections. Is incoherency a card the Republicans have become too used to playing in sowing doubt in the minds of the voting public?
I’m not American, but I remember the flip-flops that ruined Kerry’s campaign, and how it became an area of retaliation, with far less benefit, for Kerry’s team.
As a strategy, it works
As for Kerry, so for climate change: incoherency and uncertainty are two traits that are successful strategies for those who would prefer least change to a fossil-fuel based capital economy. I’ve just been reading in Boykoff and Rajan’s summary of media coverage of climate science, that reiterates the fact that right-wing oil lobby and fossil fuel industry groups have constantly funded and led campaigns to sow uncertainty in the minds of the public:
[d]issenters have… earned privileged access to various influential US policy-makers who deal with climate change, perhaps owing in part to a confluence of interests and objectives. Research by McCright and Dunlap examined how these individuals and groups developed competing discourses to disempower respected climate scientists. They have also tracked how they worked to reframe climate science and related policy issues with greater uncertainty, therefore breeding greater public confusion (McCright & Dunlap, 2000, 2003; McCright, 2007).
But it’s the Republicans being incoherent this time, not the Democracts?
Yes. But sometimes in the media, that doesn’t really matter. A survey conducted by Hargreaves, Lewis and Speers (2003) (PDF) found that people make causal connections where there are only associated links in relation to climate change. That is, more people thought the ozone layer was causing global warming than CO2 emissions.
Maybe McCain is taking the same, measured, approach to reframing climate science. Dropping his own certainties to win back the Republican heartland vote, and maybe take a few floaters, those who hear the news but don’t really pay too much attention to who said what, along with him?
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lol, Try Kerry. Just try it. With the recent revelations of our climate science and scientists, I believe indictments and testimony probably ought to come first.