reuters

Keystone XL’s organizing principle
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The GOP thought it had Obama in a trap — approve the pipeline and anger environmentalists, deny it and anger construction unions — and that the president had seemingly slipped out of that trap by delaying the decision. Infuriated, Republicans threatened to attach a rider to December’s payroll tax bill forcing Obama to make a decision within six months.

At that point, the administration made it clear that if Congress rushed it into a decision without adequate environmental review, it would reject the pipeline. Nonetheless, the GOP attached the rider to the bill. So yesterday, true to his word, Obama rejected the pipeline.

In other words, Republicans killed their own pet project. Maybe they thought they could bully Obama into submission, in which case they disastrously miscalculated. Or maybe they cared more about an election-year talking point than the pipeline itself. Either way, rank-and-file Republicans who genuinely wanted to see the pipeline built have every reason to be angry with their congressional leadership, which has again opted for tantrums over tangible policy victories.
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The Keystone XL victory (along with the stunning reversal of momentum behind the Stop Online Piracy Act) shows that organizing still matters. Organizing brings money and intensity, which are the coin of the realm in politics. If the Keystone coalition is capable of a victory on policy, there’s no reason continued organizing can’t win a victory on messaging.

For the coalition winning that victory will mean going directly after its enemy’s purported strength: jobs. In a press conference denouncing Obama’s decision yesterday, Speaker of the House John Boehner claimed that canceling the pipeline would destroy tens of thousands of jobs. But the only independent study done on the matter, from the Cornell Global Labor Institute, found that the pipeline would create between 500 and 1,400 jobs, almost all temporary construction jobs. The State Department, meanwhile, estimates it would create 5,000 to 6,000 jobs.

By way of contrast, just a few months ago the GOP rallied to vote down the president’s American Jobs Act, which, according to a Moody’s Analytics estimate, would have created 1.9 million jobs. That a short-term pipeline project has become the heart of the GOP jobs program is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the conservative economic agenda.

The pipeline also wouldn’t have served the (somewhat illusory) goal of “energy independence.” Americans will have no special claim on the oil piped through it. As recent reports have shown, the vast bulk of that oil will be exported to petro-hungry areas like Europe and Latin America. TransCanada officials have admitted in congressional testimony that opening Canada’s oil to export will boost its value and thus increase its price for Americans. More likely, any change in the price of oil or gasoline will be a faint signal lost amid natural fluctuations. [more]