by David Steven | Mar 10, 2008 | North America
Here comes ‘experience‘:
For all her years on the public stage, Mrs. Clinton has never come close to assembling and running an enterprise like the 700-person, $170 million-and-counting campaign organization that she has created. At times, her aides made assumptions about tactics and voters that turned out to be wrong. They nearly ran out of money at all the wrong times, like just after Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the New Hampshire primary and right before the 22 state nominating contests on Feb. 5.
The day after her loss in the Iowa caucuses, Mrs. Clinton took command of a long meeting in New Hampshire. “I’ll do whatever you guys need me to do,” she said, a participant recalled. “I get the message.”
But a month later, she described herself as stunned to learn the campaign was nearly broke — notwithstanding financial reports sent to her every week by e-mail — and was all but conceding the 11 contests that were to come over the next month.
Unlike Mr. Bush, Mrs. Clinton has shown no interest in having one strong person running all aspects of the campaign operation. And unlike her husband during the early part of his 1992 bid for the presidency, she does not try to keep a hand in everything, with lines of communications all through the campaign.
Instead, she talked daily to a few people: Mr. Penn, Ms. Solis Doyle and, now, Ms. Williams. Even Mr. Ickes, her longtime friend and adviser, says he speaks with her infrequently.
This approach, many of her associates said, had the effect of breeding resentment at campaign headquarters. Since there was no one person in charge, they said, it was hard to make decisions, and Mr. Penn would frequently use his personal connection with Mrs. Clinton to block the campaign from moving in directions he opposed, like putting an increased emphasis on trying to present a human side of Mrs. Clinton.
by Alex Evans | Mar 10, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
This morning’s Guardian has a leaked report from EU foreign policy chiefs Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, due to go to all 27 heads of government this weekend, warning of “significant potential conflicts” in the decades ahead as a result of “intensified competition over access to, and control over, energy resources”. Ian Traynor reports:
The officials single out the impact of the thawing Arctic and its emergence as a potential flashpoint of rival claims, pointing to the Kremlin’s grab for the Arctic last year when President Vladimir Putin hailed as heroes a team of scientists who planted a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed. Developments in the Arctic had “potential consequences for international stability and European security interests”.
“The rapid melting of the polar ice caps, in particular the Arctic, is opening up new waterways and international trade routes,” the report notes. “The increased accessibility of the enormous hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic region is changing the geostrategic dynamics of the region.”
Meanwhile, the FT is carrying a different angle on Arctic energy: consternation in Ottawa that the US Energy Security and Independence Act 2007 might prohibit the US from buying tar sands from Alberta. In a letter to Robert Gates, CCd to Condi Rice and Samuel Bodman (you’ve got to love the public affairs strategy – sent to the Defense Sec, copied to the Energy Sec), Canada raises concerns about section 526 of the law, which
…limits US government procurement of alternative fuels to those from which the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions are equal to or less than those from conventional fuel from conventional petroleum sources. Canada’s oil sands are considered unconventional fuels, and producing them emits more greenhouse gas than conventional production.
So, er, how much more greenhouse gas does oil from tar sands emit? Well, the FT says, “environmentalists say extracting a barrel of crude from oil sands results in five times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions than extracting conventional crude” – though some energy companies dispute the figure.
