President Obama launched a clean energy revolution and Republicans are still whining about Solyndra
At the NRA convention this weekend, you didn’t hear one mention of the issue that’s most threatening to gun owners: the 19,000 suicides by firearms in America each year.
But you did hear about waterboarding as a religious rite, #Benghazi and Solyndra.
Solyndra became the synecdoche for the Stimulus for Republicans as they tried to suggest that the loan programs in the single most effective government economic intervention since World War II were scandal-ridden failures.
Michael Grunwald — who wrote the definitive book on the Stimulus — often notes that “everything Republicans have said about Solyndra is bullshit.”
The point of the loan effort was to be adventurous and launch new industries — and it worked, unleashing a silent clean energy revolution that’s one of President Obama’s greatest and least publicized successes.
That Republicans are still pointing and laughing at Solyndra in 2014 is ridiculous. That they’re doing it in 2014 knowing that America’s solar capacity grew 418 percent in 4 years almost exclusively as a result of boost of the Stimulus is beyond insulting.
There’s nothing theoretical or debatable about this. This is an undeniable success of a magnitude that the right cannot even accept the government is capable of sparking.
You can’t deny that the world’s largest solar plant — the Hoover Dam of solar — just opened in Yuma, Arizona as the result of a loan guarantee from the Stimulus.
But you can ignore it and lie about Solyndra.
Republicans do this because they know they’ve trained their audience to have melodramatic responses to certain words. Solyndra: BAD. Reagan: GOOD.
It’s an effective tactic because most people don’t have time to get into detail, the news media doesn’t garner many clicks from success stories and the right spends millions in ads that reenforce their lies. That’s how you get a program that is rapidly transforming America’s energy sector, creating jobs and possibly even preventing a climate disaster as a code word for “BAD.”
A new poll shows that 57 percent of Americans don’t think the administration met its enrollment goals for Obamacare, even though it exceeded them. Another undeniable fact erased by effective GOP message discipline.
Republicans keep using this strategy because it’s profitable and it even works, occasionally, especially when an economy and deficit they left for a new Democratic president is particularly awful.
But when solar cells start appearing on roofs and family members can pursue their dreams because of Obamacare, the American people will be reminded just how dumb the right thinks they are.
[Photo by Dennis Schroeder, National Renewable Energy Laboratory]
