Republican Senator from the Great State of South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, apparently isn’t chummy enough with one of the major constituencies of the Republican Party. Neoconservatives? No, not them. Religious Fundamentalists? Maybe, but he’s still talking the talk. Glenn Beck and the tea-baggers? You betcha, but that’s not the group that he’s really offended. Offended enough that they are running advocacy ads against him in his home state. No the group that is really pissed off at Senator Graham is the group that thought he was always in their hip pocket, bought and paid for, as it were: Big Oil:
WASHINGTON — A Washington advocacy group with close ties to Big Oil started running ads Thursday on South Carolina radio stations, targeting Sen. Lindsey Graham for supporting taxes on carbon emissions.
The American Energy Alliance, funded in part by oil and natural gas companies, utilities and other energy-industry firms, launched the initiative in response to Graham’s recent collaboration with Sen. John Kerry on cap-and-trade legislation. [..]
“This is going to be more than a radio campaign,” Creighton said. “We’re going to roll out additional TV and Internet ads in the next few weeks.”
Oh my. What did Lindsey do? Well, he had the nerve to attempt some real bipartisanship on the issue of climate change and energy with John “The Purple Bandaid” Kerry, that’s what:
Graham, a military lawyer and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and the party’s 2004 presidential nominee, wrote an Oct. 11 column in the New York Times.
“Our partnership represents a fresh attempt to find consensus that adheres to our core principles and leads to both a climate change solution and energy independence,” the two senators wrote.
Their column sketched a potential compromise in which Democrats would allow offshore oil drilling and new nuclear power plants, while Republicans would recognize global warming as an urgent problem and accept caps on carbon emissions from big factories and power plants.
Poor Lindsey. Being a hardcore Republican isn’t enough anymore. You cross one little line and Ka-BOOM! out come the big guns to blast you back into the fold. I wish the “Far Left” had this kind of power over Democrats. But then, we don’t have entire industries at our beck and call to enforce party discipline. All we have is phone calls, boycotts and the occasional small political contribution. Funding major ad campaigns to target a Senator for not supporting the public option? A little beyond our means.