Hillary's Keystone pivot

Hillary's Keystone pivot draws greens' cheers

But Republicans mock her for waiting until D.C. was 'distracted' with the pope's visit.

By Elana Schor and Annie Karni

Hillary Clinton's left turn on the Keystone XL oil pipeline won her heaps of praise Tuesday from the same climate activists who had spent five years denouncing her silence on the most divisive environmental controversy of Barack Obama's presidency.

But it also opened her to fresh attacks from Republicans who accused her of putting ideology ahead of the thousands of construction jobs the proposed Canada-to-Texas pipeline would create — and of showing obvious political calculation in announcing her stance just as the media were distracted with Pope Francis' arrival in Washington.

A campaign aide insisted that Clinton’s delay in announcing her opposition to Keystone had nothing to do with political calculus — instead, it was about nailing down timing that worked for the White House. Clinton, who had installed environmentalist and former Obama aide John Podesta as her chief campaign adviser, was long planning to run against pipeline, the aide said.

Still, she didn’t voice that opinion in public until her campaign appearance Tuesday in Iowa, when she uttered three words that greens had longed to hear: “I oppose it."

“We need to be transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy," Clinton told the crowd, while criticizing the pipeline as “a distraction from important work we have to do on climate change.”

Her GOP opponents didn’t buy the timing, which came more than seven years after Keystone’s developer first applied for a permit for the $8 billion pipeline. “Hoping that Americans would be distracted by the Pope's visit, Hillary finally admitted she opposes #KeystoneXL,” GOP presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal said on Twitter.

Democrats affiliated with her presidential rivals attributed Clinton's timing to growing concern about her poll numbers in the primaries, and the realization that she could not glide through without making her opinion known.

But the campaign aide said Clinton had privately told labor officials in recent weeks about her position, and that the White House was briefed before her announcement Tuesday.

Her comments made her the last major Democratic presidential candidate to come out against Keystone, a project that has dragged through more than seven years of wrangling and several environmental reviews that appeared to favor the pipeline — most of them produced by the State Department when Clinton was secretary. Obama remains the project’s biggest wildcard: He hasn’t said whether he will grant or deny a permit for the pipeline, or when he’ll decide, even as Republicans lambaste him for repeatedly postponing the issue.

As secretary, Clinton had galvanized a nationwide activist campaign against Keystone with her off-the-cuff remarks in 2010 that the department was "inclined" to approve the $8 billion-plus project. That was her last substantive public statement on the issue until Tuesday.

More recently, Clinton had said for months that she didn’t want to “prejudge” the Keystone verdict — memorably saying in July that she might speak out “if it is undecided when I become president.” But she told the Des Moines Register’s editorial board on Tuesday that “it has now been a long time since I left the State Department.”

The swift Republican attacks that followed made it plain that Clinton’s appeal to the Democratic base won't come without a cost should she become the party's nominee.

“Buried amidst the Pope Francis fanfare, Hillary Clinton’s sudden opposition to the Keystone Pipeline makes clear she is running scared from Bernie Sanders,” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said, naming the Vermont socialist who has been leading Clinton in the polls in New Hampshire. He added: “America’s workers shouldn’t get punched in the gut with another left-wing, job-killing mandate simply because Bernie Sanders is running circles around Hillary Clinton."

Clinton "finally says what we already knew," Jeb Bush tweeted after her Iowa remarks. "She favors environmental extremists over U.S. jobs." Republican hopefuls Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Lindsey Graham also weighed in, with Graham tweeting that “as president, I would immediately approve Keystone XL.”

Meanwhile, her Democratic primary rivals — aware that her silence on Keystone has rankled the party's grassroots and environmentalists — treated Clinton like a latecomer to an issue that has united liberals.

“As a senator who has vigorously opposed the Keystone pipeline from the beginning, I am glad that Secretary Clinton finally has made a decision and I welcome her opposition to the pipeline,” Sanders said. "Clearly it would be absurd to encourage the extraction and transportation of some of the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet."

"On issue after issue," Democratic hopeful Martin O'Malley piled on, "Secretary Clinton has followed — not forged — public opinion."

But environmentalists gave Clinton full credit for coming around on Keystone. Bill McKibben, the 350.org co-founder and godfather of the anti-pipeline movement, heaped particular praise on her after warning her about "mistrust" earlier this year.

“I think she's really coming to understand that climate is going to be a defining issue of this election,” McKibben told POLITICO. “And maybe, if you also look at her stand on Arctic drilling, she's concluding that the most visible way to make quick progress is to keep carbon in the ground.”

Tiernan Sittenfeld, a senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, also cited Clinton’s opposition to Arctic drilling in calling the candidate's Keystone move “inspiring and exciting.”

Rather than blasting Clinton outright, the oil and gas industry's top lobbying group lamented what chief Jack Gerard called “a missed opportunity to seize the true potential of our energy renaissance.”

“It is most unfortunate for American workers and consumers that she has joined the forces of delay and denial,” Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said of Clinton.

TransCanada, the Calgary-based corporation behind the plan to ship upwards of 800,000 barrels a day of heavy Canadian oil south to U.S. refineries, also sidestepped any criticism of Clinton.

"Our focus remains on securing a permit to build Keystone XL," company spokesman Davis Sheremata said in a statement. "The fundamental argument for Keystone XL has been and remains — the U.S. imports millions of barrels of oil every day, so where do Americans want their oil to come from? Do they want it from Iran and Venezuela — where American values of freedom and democracy are not shared — or do they want Canadian and American crude oil transported through Keystone XL."

Obama has repeatedly dismissed those kinds of arguments in the past year, describing Keystone as a project that would mainly benefit Canadian oil producers while generating only a few dozen permanent U.S. jobs once the pipeline is built. Still, he hasn’t said whether he thinks the pipeline would "significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” the litmus test he laid out for the project during a climate speech in June 2013.

Obama’s senior aides at the time included Podesta, who has long opposed the project and was seen as trying to push the administration on climate change and other environmental issues. (Podesta said then that he was recusing himself on Keystone.) Podesta is now Clinton’s campaign chairman, while the environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, another staunch Keystone opponent, is a major 2016 fundraiser for the Democratic frontrunner.

Clinton had been hinting through the press lately that she was getting close to making her own views known. “I am getting impatient,” she said at a campaign stop in Nevada last month. “I’m not comfortable saying, you know, ‘I have to keep my opinion to myself’ given the fact that I was involved in it. So at some point I may change my view on that.”

Last week, she got closer, telling attendees at a New Hampshire town hall that “I’m putting the White House on notice, I’m going to tell you what I think — soon.”

Clinton's silence ended on Tuesday thanks to an activist who consulted in advance with 350.org, the upstart green group that has targeted her relentlessly on the pipeline. She told the activist that she has "a responsibility to you and voters who ask me about this."

"As she has said previously, she wanted to respect the president’s timetable for making a decision and give her successor, Secretary [of State John] Kerry, the space to conduct a thorough process," the Clinton aide said by email. "However, when she launched her campaign earlier this year, she expected a decision would have been made before now."

The pipeline's lengthy review remains in its final phase after five massive environmental studies and multiple lawsuits in Nebraska, where anti-pipeline landowners have challenged the legality of Keystone's route through sensitive farmland. White House spokesman Josh Earnest, speaking before Clinton's remarks, said Tuesday that the review remains ongoing, and "once the State Department has put forward a recommendation the president will consider it and he'll make a decision."

After years of oil-industry confidence that Keystone would eventually get built, however, even many of the pipeline's supporters are openly resigned to Obama rejecting it. Clinton's remarks "should put pressure on the Obama administration to reject the pipeline soon," David Turnbull of the green group Oil Change International said.

Keystone opponents had previously distrusted Clinton based on her 2010 comments, in which she said: “We’re either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada … until we can get our act together as a country and figure out that clean, renewable energy is in both our economic interests and the interests of our planet.” Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, also indicated he favored the pipeline during remarks in 2012 that still appear in pro-Keystone television ads. And some Keystone opponents have accused the State Department of favoritism toward the project, including during the years when she was secretary.

After Tuesday’s turnabout, Clinton said she plans to release more detailed proposals soon for better coordination with Canada and Mexico on making a "transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy."

“I actually think it will put us in a much stronger economic and strategic position if we do have this North American approach,” she said at a meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board.