As President Barack Obama and some of his White House staff send more and more signals that they are open to negotiating away from insistence on auctioning all CO2 emission allowances, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing the same. Maybe some of her motivation comes from a little gift from Jennings Randolph.
Randolph was a gracious, old-school Democratic lawmaker from West Virginia, who with Vermont Senator Robert Stafford led the Environment and Public Works Committee back in the 1980s with that kind of comity that hardly exists any more. Of different parties, they really did appear to work together to find ways of living productively together. According to a Washington Post column today, Randolph gave Pelosi's father something a long time ago that she still keeps in her office: a little statue of a coal miner.
E.J. Dionne Jr. says in his column that while he was interviewing Pelosi last week, she called attention to the gift as she talked about the difficult regional issues involved in winning a greenhouse gas control legislation.
She said she points to the statue when she discusses energy and environmental questions with her mining-state colleagues. "They need not fear what I would write as a bill, [that I would] say, 'Let's write a bill without coal,'" she said. "You can't."
So when Pelosi is lumped with all the Californians who hold sway in the Obama era, one might want to recognize that she's not all California. She's from old-school political Baltimore, after all, and here we find she has an attachment to a most improbable artifact. It's good to know.
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