“Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd insisted that the Keystone XL pipeline failed to get support because “environmental movement … dragged the president to this position.”
“The reason the president is where he is today, the reason Hillary Clinton is where she is today on this issue goes to the environmental movement on the left,” Todd explained on “MSNBC Live” Friday. (RELATED: Hillary Clinton Finally Takes Position On Keystone)
Keystone became a “be all, end all” symbol that “if you are truly an environmentalist, you are against this thing. If you’re not, then you can’t call yourself a real advocate on the climate change issue, you can’t call yourself a real environmentalist,” explained Todd.
Commenting on the election ramifications, Todd suggested, “What’s been fascinating about this is that when this whole push first began by the company, TransCanada to try to get this pipeline through a few years back, President Obama was essentially neutral on the project. And if you recall, Hillary Clinton was secretary of state when it first began, where you had to have the State Department because it was something that crossed borders, the State Department was involved in whether to preliminarily approve the plans to build this pipeline.” Initially, “The president was fairly neutral.”
Obama thought the arguments from both environmentalists and business community were “over the top.”
During the 2012 elections, Obama was “sort of trying to straddle this straw man middle on this issue,” explained Todd.