Posted on 07/31/2012 6:36:51 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
Romney and his super PAC have taken millions from funders with strong green streaks — despite the fact that the former Massachusetts governor has run to the right in the primary, proclaiming doubts about global-warming science and trashing President Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas emissions policies.
Julian Robertson, founder of the Tiger Management hedge fund, helped put cap-and-trade legislation on the map with $60 million in contributions over the past decade to the Environmental Defense Fund.
Now, Robertson has given $1.25 million to Romney’s Restore our Future super PAC, plus the maximum $2,500 to the Romney campaign.
Other green-minded financial backers may not be giving as much as Robertson, but they still share the view that climate-change science and a solid environmental agenda wouldn’t be a lost cause if Romney won the White House.
“My feeling is that on these issues that people learn,” said former Gov. Thomas Kean (R-N.J.), who maxed out last fall to Romney with a $2,500 check. “And my hope is, as time goes on, he will understand that not everybody agrees on how you deal with these issues, but I hope he will agree with 99 percent of the scientists who believe this is an issue that we have to deal with.”
As president, Kean said he hoped Romney could duplicate his Beacon Hill successes in building coalitions with Democrats on issues such as energy and the environment. In addition, Kean noted that Romney wouldn’t face the same gridlocked climate debate of recent years, in large part because of the boom in domestic natural gas production that’s helped lower the nation’s greenhouse gas emission levels. “The whole game has changed,” Kean said.
Rob Sisson, president of the Republicans for Environmental Protection, said he’s scraping together personal funds to write a check to the Romney campaign after getting a chance to meet him for the first time last month during a town hall campaign stop in Kalamazoo, Mich.
“I think his record as governor was pretty good as far as Republicans go,” said Sisson, who also gave $1,000 last June to Jon Huntsman’s campaign. “I really get the sense from him and the folks around him with whom I’ve spoken that as president he’d really look at each situation, gather the data and really make a decision that’s best for the country.”
“If that goes against the grain of how he’s campaigning now, so be it,” Sisson added. “He’s going to be driven by data and facts and not emotions and getting pushed into one corner by one faction of the party.”
Among the other green Romney donors is Texas businessman and philanthropist Trammell S. Crow, founder of Earth Day Dallas and winner of the Republicans for Environmental Protection’s Green Elephant Award in 2007. Crow and his family have given $71,000 this cycle to Republicans, including $15,000 to the Republican National Committee and $5,000 to Romney, according to donation data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
“I am voting for Mitt Romney and I believe in global warming,” Crow said in a statement to POLITICO.
Of course, for every green-minded GOP donor, there’s a large segment of supporters pushing Romney in another direction on energy issues. Campaigning Thursday in North Dakota, Romney tapped Harold Hamm, an Oklahoma oil billionaire and a major GOP contributor, to head his campaign’s energy advisory panel. There’s also William Koch, founder of Oxbow Corp., a West Palm Beach, Fla.-based energy firm that’s given $1 million to Romney’s super PAC.
A former George W. Bush administration energy official unaffiliated with any campaign said green-minded donors won’t change Romney’s message. “If he were getting contributions from some of the guys who contribute to our president, some of the street activists, Bill Ayers, I’d be worried. But that doesn’t worry me,” the official said.
Others are raising expectations because of heavy-hitting Republican donors such as Robertson.
Continue Reading Text Size - + reset Listen “If for some climate advocates the influence of money in politics does not give pause, then such advocates can hope that Robertson will use his access and influence with the Romney team to shift the candidate’s position on climate change should Romney win the GOP nomination, and especially if he makes it to the White House,” American University professor Matthew Nisbet wrote last month on his blog.
If Romney won, Nisbet concluded that Robertson’s role as an EDF trustee and major donor “should give the organization significant access to the Oval Office.”
Robertson isn’t trying to buy access, said his spokesman Fraser Seitel.
“The reasons he’s supporting Romney are very simple,” Seitel said. “In his view, Romney is smart enough, moral enough and fit enough to run the country.”
“In terms of the environment and climate-change controls, which he does believe is one of the most important issues the country and the world faces, he has confidence that Romney, once he’s in there, will do the right thing,” Seitel added.
Green-minded donors have also shelled out to other GOP presidential candidates this cycle.
Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a longtime Nature Conservancy board member, gave the maximum $2,500 to Huntsman last summer. Former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray gave $2,500 to Huntsman and then followed up with the same amount in January to Romney after Huntsman left the race. Bill Doré, a semi-retired energy consultant, has donated more than $1 million to the super PAC boosting Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign.
Doré made his fortune in the pipeline and offshore drilling equipment business. But for years, Doré, now 69, also butted heads with the oil and gas industry in his native Louisiana. Not only did he sue multiple oil companies for polluting 9,000 acres of marshland he had leased to them for drilling, but he also was a leading backer of bills in the Louisiana Legislature to protect other landowners’ ability to file similar so-called legacy site suits.
“I am absolutely sure that he lost friends over that,” said Butch Gautreaux, a former Democratic state senator who sponsored legislation on the issue backed by Doré.
Gautreaux, who received at least $2,500 in campaign contributions from Doré, told POLITICO that Doré “not only put himself on the line, but he also spent a lot of money doing engineering studies backing what he was alleging at the time.”
Before this year, Doré had given $637,000 in federal and state contributions, split about equally between the parties. His biggest contributions had been to the Republican Governors Association ($50,000 in 2010) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ($28,500 in 2008) — which, interestingly, had helped defeat Santorum in 2006.
Doré did not respond to repeated requests for comment about his political views or motivation for donating to the super PAC supporting Santorum, who has pushed for expanded oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas.
But Gautreaux, who said he considers himself “good friends” with Doré, called him “an oil and gas environmentalist” and said his political involvement is motivated by a sense of “doing what you believe is the right thing to do for the right reason.”
There's no way that will happen. The GOP-E has conservatives exactly where they want them - licking their hands like whipped puppies. There is no way on earth the GOP-E is going to withdraw its own candidate and give conservatives a hope spot.
You are working over time for B. Hussein Obama and we both know it. You couldn’t do more for him and against conservative values then coming to the number one conservative website in the country and trying to convince us that it is ok to let Obama win a second term. I don’t have to hold my nose to vote for Romney, I will proudly vote for him for President over Obama and Connie Mack over Bill Nelson for US Senator and Will Weatherford, our next Speaker of the Fl House for my Rep. I couldn’t care less about your “principals”. This is a choice and you chose Obama and you are trying to get the feeble minded to follow your path to the demise of our great republic and that is inexcusable. You are as principled as the British General in the movie Bridge over the River Kwia who would rather see his own men died than to blow up the bridge. It’s gonna blow, with or without you. Romney 2012.
“He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Lying, left-wing, Progressive Liberal.”
Yep.
That’s why the “wait and see” policy is a good one.
It is definitely in the realm of unrealistic wish. :>)
I don’t want respect from the likes of you, Obama and your boss Val Jarrett. You surrender monkeys who’s dream it is to hold the door of the White house open when Obama returns from his second swearing in ceremony, as you bow in reverence. You talk about being ProLife when you really want Jarret and Obama putting a couple thirty something on the Supreme Court there by locking in abortions for another 30 years. You and your little wolf pack jumping from thread to thread, day after day attacking our side has been exposed for what it is, unconditional surrender.
This is a post that ignores facts, ynot.
Should I run down the liberal positions of Mitt Romney or are you simply unable to hear what principled conservatives are saying?
He is not a conservative.
In April he came out in favor of gay couples. He made it worse by saying at state level gays have the right to adopt children. Real conservative position, right?
In response to his gun control past in Massachusetts, JUST LAST Monday he came out in favor of gun control, saying gun control that was bi-partisan was “the kind of legislation I like.”
As recently as Dec 2007 he said his position was effectively pro-abortion.
He hires illegals, is afraid to speak against Obama’s amnesty for young illegals, and basically tests the wind depending on the crowd to which he’s speaking.
He is a “greenie” one moment, like this article suggests, and a conservative the next.
He raises “fees” in Massachusetts to the tune of nearly a billion dollars.
He refuses to recant RomneyCare, apparently endorsing a big goverment takeover of healthcare.
Your post ignores so much that it is ignorant.
It’s your kind of blindness that has gotten our conservative movement to this place in time, and you don’t even have the sense to be friends with your friends.
With you, “the enemy of your friends is your friend.”
You’re making your bed, so lie in it.
Maybe you could teach Romney to love the Constitution, while yer at it?
She also explained that she wouldn't be voting "for" Romney, she'd be voting "against" Obama. *sigh* One cannot vote "against" anything, ever, on any ballot, whether it's a candidate or a proposition; any vote is ONLY and ALWAYS for something -- even on propositions, you can only vote FOR nixing it. Voting "against" Obama is like voting "against" killing the pretty pink unicorns: 100 percent imaginary.
Meanwhile, the solid documented reality is that Romney is a liberal Democrat registered in the Republican party. Obama was "hope and change" -- Romney is "hope he'll change." The second one is as much a hoax as the first.
The last time a president won on a plurality, he was impeached. The time before when a president won on a plurality, he was dominated by the Republican Revolution -- and that president was pretty popular in general terms. Obama is loathed, he's in real trouble with his supporters, and there's virtually zero chance he could get 50% of the vote in 2012.
I cannot vote "against" Romney any more than I can vote "against" Obama. But I have a DUTY to vote. So I'll be voting conservative down-ticket, and at the top, I'll be voting for a plurality. Despite the mathematically challenged here who emote otherwise, third-party votes favor neither major party candidate; those who shriek, "It will favor Obama because it favors the incumbent!" should argue that point with HW Bush. Every single third party vote -- and there will probably be plenty from Democrats/liberals who'll abandon Obama this tme around -- reduces the popular mandate of the winner and increases the chances of a plurality.
So I'm voting for a plurality. I'm voting third party. It favors neither Obama nor Romney, but it will count toward making the winner that much weaker in terms of a popular mandate, and that will HELP the conservatives I'll have voted for down-ticket in opposing that liberal, whether it is Obama or Romney.
There is good, solid sense in voting third party as a means to help conservatives in Congress battle liberalism and statism. It will take the most courage I've ever had to muster in an election; it will be the first time in my life I'll have declined a Republican on any ballot, let alone the top of the ticket, since I started voting in 1976, and I have voted in every major and mid-term election since. But I must face the truth: voting for Romney is as nuts as voting for Obama, and I CAN vote for a plurality in my best and only chance to weaken whichever bastard wins.
Not worried about that. The more money coming into our side (from those flakes), the less going into the enemy’s side.
And the more control the enemy has in the GOP.
Vichy republicans will not be treated well by history.
Man, you have to take your ‘Taliban’ hat off. We’re in a war here against a far greater enemy, and you’re worried about ‘Vichy republicans’. We would’ve had a tough time winning WWII with this type of thinking.
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COWARD!
The Vichy French sold out to the nazis for the illusion of power when they were really nothing but puppets.
The Vichy republicans sell out to liberals for the illusion of power and they’ll be nothing but puppets.
“Man, you have to take your ‘Taliban’ hat off. We’re in a war here against a far greater enemy, and you’re worried about ‘Vichy republicans’. We would’ve had a tough time winning WWII with this type of thinking.”
I disagree. The far greater enemy is, and has been since time immemorial, the enemy within.
How can we defeat Obama when there are Democrat collaborators within the GOP actively subverting the election? Really, why did Dick Cheney have to say *anything* about Palin? Where’s the 11th Commandment when the topic is RINOs attacking conservatives? Hmmm?
The reason you see old farts like Cheney yapping about Palin is because THEY’RE AFRAID OF HER and they’re afraind that she’ll do to the Old Boys Club in DC what she did to the corrupt Republicans in Juneau. They hate her because they know they can’t control her or buy her off and they’re AFRAID.
And people like you are enabling them when you passively sit back and let them savage actual conservatives only to object when the conservatives fight back.
Just the same way the Vichy French objected when the Resistance fought back against their Nazi masters.
I find in Samuel Adams my answer to those Republicans who would rather compromise with an enemy than defeat him:
“Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say ‘what should be the reward of such sacrifices?’ Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!”
Getting rid of the Obama bunch will give us a slightly less dangerous GOPe bunch that we will have to horsewhip like we did with BushCo on Amnesty!
I totally agree. I want to see these people gone also... McConnell, Graham, etc.. - but continuing to debate the primary battle at this moment - does no service to the greater battle before us in November. We conservatives lost in the primaries, we are stuck with Romney, just as we were stuck with McCain in 2008, but we still fought - yes I know Palin was in it - and it's the only reason I and many got enthused - but, the VP does nothing in terms of policy - so we were still pulling for McCain to win it. This battle is even more important because we have now LOST 4 YEARS and things are EVEN WORSE.
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