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Early coverage of the Cap and Trade bill has focused on the successes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, although I noted that it was also a success for conservative movement groups.

However, focus is beginning to shift. Maybe they didn’t get what they wanted? The New York Times’ John Broder notes that various groups lobbied the hell out of it. He focuses on the utilities:

The biggest concessions went to utilities, which wanted assurances that they could continue to operate and build coal-burning power plants without shouldering new costs. The utilities received not only tens of billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, but also billions for work on technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from coal combustion to help meet future pollution targets.

By not auctioning these permits, Obama lost a huge amount of money for his earlier proposals. Donald Marron notes that this totals about $600b in revenue that this bill didn’t create.

Now think about what Joe Lieberman said yesterday about the health care bill…

Lieberman cited the cost of a public plan as his primary beef with the plan.

"Part of my concern is that, and this goes to the…growing national debt, that inevitably if we create a public option, the public is going to end up pay for it and that’s a cost we can’t take on," he said.

If Obama had come out of this cap and trade debate with an extra $600b, the healthcare debate would look a lot — A LOT — different.

As the scope of the deficit becomes clearer and the political salience of it rises, the cap and trade bill may look like an increasingly poor deal for America, but also the rest of the Obama agenda.

I was struck on Thursday and Friday of last week by the extent to which activists on the right were deeply engaged on the Cap and Trade bill that narrowly passed the house last Friday.

The thing is, the media has not played this issue up. The same week that the House voted on the bill, President Barack Obama held a prime-time townhall on healthcare. Even the conservative media was mostly engaged primarily with the healthcare debate. Obama and the Democrats played and won the media cycle war.

But the conservative groups, especially Americans for Prosperity, and conservative blogs like Redstate and others kicked in. From both Republicans and Democrats, we heard about enormous call volume coming into the House. This provided a robust whip-like mechanism.

Activists understood that they were the difference between this bill passing and not.

Now the fight moves to the Senate. Already, we see Obama caving on key provisions of the deal that kept protectionist Democrats together. It is hard to see how the Democrats find the votes, especially when they need full support from the Midwest to keep their caucus together.

And next time, it is hard to see how the issue is kept under the radar. The American people will be much, much more deeply engaged.

CBS News has been running an interesting series called "Primary Questions." They ask the candidates a variety of policy and personal questions. Sometimes this format seems closer to what we’d like from a debate in terms of clarifying policy differences. However, it doesn’t always result in the nice contrasting sound-bites that you might otherwise get. [...]

Monday night, I am going to the book Launch for the latest Newt Gingrich book. A Contract with the Earth. I think this is a big deal. Once Newt takes a position, it becomes part of the mainstream in the GOP. Not in the sense that people will start to agree with you. But instead [...]

I woke up this morning, and started checking my email. The first hint was a message from a Polish friend in Brussels. Al Gore had won the Nobel Peace Prize. My friend now thinks that Al Gore has a lock on the primary and general now. I responded that that was an over-reaction. But what [...]

But what if you are worried about global warming and like furry animals? Too bad, eat yer Kangaroo: MORE kangaroos should be slaughtered and eaten to help save the world from global warming, environmental activists say. The controversial call to cut down on beef and serve more of the national symbol on our dinner plates [...]

Last week, I criticized my friend Robert Bluey’s reading of Michael Gerson’s position on immigration. My criticism was, on a broader level, that the conservative movement has very little capacity to understand conservatives who disagree with it on principal. More specifically, when deeply held beliefs begin to come into conflict with the increasingly interest group [...]

Normally, I don’t go so policy-oriented on people, but I think that there is an important point to be made here. Today Energy and Commerce  Committee Chairman John Dingell wrote: A carbon tax or fee has been endorsed by President Bush‘s former chief economic adviser, Greg Mankiw; Nobel Prize-winning conservative economist Gary Becker; the chief [...]

This is the sort of thing that the conservative blogosphere won’t understand. John McCain is foregrounding his support for global warming. Today, Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from neighboring Maine, penned a piece for the Portsmouth Herald on global warming, praising McCain.  Check this out: McCain partnered with Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to [...]

John Edwards: He also said the United States should ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants. There are some good swing swing states on that list…