Obama's Scorched Earth Day

After a bipartisan blip on financial regulation in Washington, the President is in Manhattan, warning Wall Street, "A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it."

This tough talk comes after his lofty Earth Day anniversary proclamation: "Forty years from today, when our children and grandchildren look back on what we did at this moment, let them say that we, too, met the challenges of our time and passed on a cleaner, healthier planet."

The contrast underscores a new bipolar tone in the Obama presidency, pairing his inspirational gifts with the kind of hard-edged political pressure from the White House that marked the final days of the health care war.

As key GOP elders move away from Mitch McConnell's adamant obstruction of last week, a party official tells the Washington Post of the President's role in the reversal: "His rhetoric got really sharp and really mean...That's what changed."

In his weekly address, the President labeled McConnell "cynical and deceptive," challenging moderate Republicans to put up or shut up on financial industry reform.

Yesterday, Dick Shelby voted with Democrats to control derivatives, and now Chuck Grassley is predicting, "We're very close to a deal and there will be a substantial number of Republicans that go along with it."

After more than a year of nonstop naysaying, GOP ranks are finally collapsing under the pressure of public anger over banks and bailouts, stoked by an energized President in today's appeal to industry leaders to call off their army of lobbyists who are trying to derail regulation:

“Some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is a family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business, or save for retirement. What happens here has real consequences across our country.”

The money manipulators may not respond to that message, but Congressional Republicans are showing signs of understanding that there could be "real consequences" for them in November if they don't.

As she often does, Gail Collins nailed it in her New York Times column today: "The Republican leadership originally seemed to believe that financial reform could be a replay of health care reform, with a political payoff for total obstruction. They’re discovering that the only real similarity is that both are almost impossible to explain. People love their doctors, but they tend to hate their bankers. Nobody is going to scare voters by predicting that if the Democratic bill passes, they may not be able to keep seeing the same hedge fund manager."

Getting Down to Earth Day

Barack Obama escapes the White House again. turning up today at an Iowa wind-turbine plant to tout his energy and climate-change plans while Administration members fan out to announce other initiatives and even the Coast Guard twitters about ways of saving the environment.

A Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee email from Al Gore, who invented the environment, underscores the import of Earth Day:

"I can tell you that President Obama has signaled in the strongest possible terms that he intends to take bold steps and harness innovative resources to solve the climate crisis. Not only that, but Speaker Pelosi has said she will personally shepherd climate legislation through."

Lisa Jackson, new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says her agency "is back on the job. And that's not meant to say that the employees who were here all along haven't been working hard, but a lot of that work wasn't allowed to come forth for the American people."

Not all is sweetness and light, however, as environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blasts the President and other politicians as "indentured servants" to the coal industry. "Clean coal is a dirty lie," he says.

Meanwhile. Republicans are in a brown study about how to get into the green act, although House Leader John Boehner made a start Sunday, declaring that worries about carbon dioxide are "almost comical" since human exhalations and cow emissions produce so much of it.

In any case, we can all go out and plant something. Happy Earth Day.

Running Out and Cutting Down

As gasoline prices head toward $4 a gallon, there are signs Americans are starting to use less.

“Sustained higher gasoline prices are beginning to show up in lower gasoline consumption,” an analyst for the Energy Information Administration observes as usage declines for the first time in two decades, albeit by only a fraction of one percent. The drop was more dramatic last Christmas when total miles traveled in the US dropped 3.9 percent compared with a year earlier.

Not a minute too soon, according to Paul Krugman, who foresees hard times when "an ever-growing world economy pushes up against the limits of a finite planet" and rich countries "face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living" and poorer countries "find themselves living dangerously close to the edge--or over it."

In this election year, politicians will talk darkly about oil industry collusion to raise prices, which may well be true, but not much about conservation. Voters don't want to hear about driving less, carpooling, using mass transit and buying fuel-efficient vehicles.

But $4 a gallon seems to be getting their attention, and $5 would have them spellbound. Starting to conserve now would help stave that off.

Earth Day would be a good time to start.