Pipe Dreams

Presidential candidates tweet their reactions to Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline.

By Reed McManus

November 6, 2015

 Presidential candidates tweet their reactions to Obama's rejection of Keystone pipeline.

No one is particularly surprised at the partisan divide in the reactions from leading presidential candidates to President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. But Twitter's abbreviated format does give us a chance to see some of those reactions in one glance:

 

Among Democrats:

Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton): The right call. Now it's time to make America a clean superpower."

Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders): "As a leader in the opposition to Keystone XL from Day 1, I strongly applaud the president's decision to kill this project once and for all."

Martin O'Malley (@MartinOMalley): "I've long opposed #KeystoneXL because we know it will exacerbate climate change and extend our reliance on fossil fuels." 

 

Among (leading) Republicans: 

Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump): "So sad that Obama rejected Keystone Pipeline. Thousands of jobs, good for the environment, no downside!"

Marco Rubio (@marcorubio): "When I'm president, Keystone will be approved, and President Obama's backwards energy policies will come to an end."

Ted Cruz (@tedcruz): "As President, I'd authorize #KeystoneXL, and we'd get Americans to work!"

Jeb Bush (@JebBush): "The Obama Admin's politically motivated rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline is a self-inflicted attack on the U.S. economy and jobs." 

Rand Paul (@RandPaul):  "Keystone XL pipeline should be approved! @POTUS is once again stopping progress and blocking job creation."

 

At press time, GOP poll-leader Dr. Ben Carson (@RealBenCarson) had not tweeted on the Keystone decision, presumably because he is distracted by the discovery that he fabricated his story about being offered a full scholarship to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Nor had Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, or John Kasich. Carly Fiorina posted a pro-Keystone video, but had not tweeted. For brevity, we looked only at the top ten GOP candidates in the Real Clear Politics national poll average. A special shout-out, however, to bottom-of-the-pile Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal), who claims Obama rejected Keystone "to appease the agenda of science denying radicals."

If desire to tackle climate change is a litmus test for you, your electoral direction seems pretty easy. Last year New York magazine's Frank Rich wrote that "climate-change denial has become a proxy for a whole smorgasbord of powerful ideological imperatives: opposition to governmental regulation; resistance to taxation (especially of such Republican sugar daddies as the coal, oil, and gas industries); class resentment of intellectual elites in academia and Prius-driving Hollywood; and, in some quarters, rejection of any kind of science that dares undermine the supremacy of God as the primary actor in all Earthly activity….It’s a pipe dream to think the Republican Party is going to shift on this any time soon."

In fact, a paper recently published in the journal Politics and Policy compared the climate positions of conservative political parties around the world, and found that "the U.S. Republican Party stands alone in its rejection of the need to tackle climate change" and its desire to undermine international climate-change efforts.