Word: gas
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Want to wreck the environment? Have a baby. Each bundle of joy gobbles up more of the planet's food, clogs garbage dumps with diapers, churns through plastic toys and winds up a gas-guzzling, resource-consuming grown-up like the rest of us. Still, babies are awfully cute. Given that most people still intend to procreate, what's an environmentally conscious parent...
...before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Hillary Clinton stood on the back of a vintage pickup truck in Gastonia, N.C., and let fly in the most impressive fashion - a woman transformed from Eleanor Roosevelt into Huey Long in two short months. Spotting a big yellow placard that said GAS TAX HOLIDAY IS BLATANT PANDERING - a sign she would have ignored in her earlier, less feisty incarnations - she went after the young Obamish sign-holders: Why wasn't the Federal Reserve accused of pandering when it bailed out the Bear Stearns investment bank to the tune of $30 billion...
...Watching the junior Senator from New York, I was of two minds. My high-minded policy brain was, of course, appalled. The gas-tax holiday was a scam. It had been tried at various times - Barack Obama had voted for a local version in the Illinois legislature - and prices never came down. The oil companies and gas-station owners simply pocketed the difference. Clinton's "responsible" version of the plan was also a scam. She wanted to pay for it with a "windfall profits" tax on the oil companies, but she had earlier, and more responsibly, called for the elimination...
...with good reason. The formerly charismatic Obama had undergone a transformation of his own: from John F. Kennedy to Adlai Stevenson, from dashing rhetorician to good-government egghead. He derided the gas-tax holiday as the gimmick it was, gambling that Democrats would see through the ruse. He trudged through the Wright debacle, never allowing his impeccable disposition to slip toward anger or pettiness. On the Sunday before the primaries, he gave a dour, newsless interview to Tim Russert, enduring another 20 minutes of questions about the Reverend Wright. Meanwhile, Clinton was spiky and histrionic in her simultaneous duel with...
...Clinton's apparent loss of the nomination was a consequence of her campaign's incompetence, but it was also a result of her reliance on the same-old. The shameless populism that seemed a possible game changer to media observers, micro-ideas like the gas-tax holiday, the willingness to go negative - which Obama tried intermittently, in halfhearted reaction to Clinton's attacks - appeared very old and clichéd to Obama's legion of young supporters, who were the real game changers in this year of extraordinary turnouts. That, and the fact that Democrats have been the party...