Although President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign welcomed the joint endorsements of several big name environmental groups Wednesday, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe contends the president is actually trying to distance himself from their policies.
“He’s trying to run away from the far-left environmentalists right now,” Inhofe explained Wednesday afternoon at an Americans for Tax Reform lunch event promoting his book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”
Earlier in the day Inhofe’s office released a statement congratulating the president on his endorsements from the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Environment America, but noted that Obama is not touting his own environmental accomplishments.
“[N]ow that Americans are reeling from the skyrocketing gas and electricity prices that President Obama promised; angry that he stopped the Keystone pipeline and the tens of thousands of jobs it would have created; and outraged over the taxpayer dollars that were wasted on companies like Solyndra, President Obama doesn’t seem to be interested in touting these major accomplishments,” Inhofe said in the statement.
The Oklahoma senator said that while Obama is trying to disassociate himself from the results of his environmental policies, he is still on board with environmentalists’ agenda.
“As I said, he’s trying to run away from them right now. It is kind of like the whispering that he did when he was talking about Putin — ‘you tell Putin that, don’t worry about this, as soon as I’m re-elected we’re going to be able to do these things,’” Inhofe said during the lunch event, referring to Obama’s hot mic moment with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March. “That’s what he’s saying right now to the environmentalist community.”
Inhofe added that his side of the debate about global warming and other green-group priorities has “clearly won” over the environmentalist left, but that the fight is far from over.
Videography by Grae Stafford