Energy

Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers issued last September, has been praised to high heavens by Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Naomi Klein, and reviewers at NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. This ought to be enough to warn any sensible reader to stay far away from its pages and to resign promptly from any reading group that nominates it for collective perusal. But I am not always sensible. The title lured me, for what better word to describe our Zeitgeist?

Joe Manchin was never going to vote for Build Back Better. Now that he's declared himself a "no" and all but killed President Biden's titanic spending package, it's time for Democrats to admit as much. To be sure, Manchin has played well the role of centrist negotiator. He's furrowed his brow and raised pragmatic concerns over renewable energy and inflation. He's huddled with his fellow Joe at the White House and won plenty of concessions. He's provided chum for bored (and boring) political analysts, as analyzing him and his fellow holdout Kyrsten Sinema became a kind of Kremlinology for the Twitter-addicted. But such breathless parsing forgets one simple fact: all politics is local.

Sigmund Freud famously noted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In the case of fracking, even Freud would have acknowledged that fracking is about so much more than just fracking. That is why the issue is so important to voters beyond those in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas where so much oil and natural gas is produced. That is also why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have tried to walk back their positions on fracking from the Democratic primary, when they said they’d ban fracking and cease the use of carbon-based energy sources, as well as push for the budget-busting and progressive utopian Green New Deal. Of course, it’s about jobs.

Dublin, Ohio Since the presidential election of 1944 when Ohio went with loser Thomas Dewey over winner Franklin Roosevelt, Ohio voters have given majority support to every presidential winner except one. The sole ‘error’ occurred in 1960 when Ohio went with loser Richard Nixon over winner John F. Kennedy. That means Ohio has gone 14 straight elections, or 60 straight years, picking the winner. No other state carries such a distinguished record. With Joe Biden barely campaigning in Ohio and Donald Trump covering the state — signs point to Trump again winning Ohio in 2020, albeit with a smaller margin. Nevertheless, will Ohio be wrong this year? Don’t bet on it. For years, Ohio’s slogan was ‘The Heart of It All!

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What could be more emblematic of the American Dream than fracking, the miracle technology that has created thousands of real jobs, lowered the cost of living, generated wealth and prosperity, boosted competitiveness and helped make the United States not just energy independent, but a net exporter of natural gas and petroleum products for the first time in decades? And what could be more characteristic of the elitist, small-minded, anti-market, anti-blue-collar, anti-growth, green-obsessed liberal-left than that the Democratic party is hell-bent on banning it?