The WSJ reports on Chief of Staff Bill Daley's role in rolling back regulations on ozone:
When the American Lung Association mentioned a poll showing public support for EPA standards, Mr. Daley appeared uninterested, according to one person in the room. "He literally cut the person off and said 'I don't give a [expletive] about the poll'," this person said. … The same day, Mr. Daley met with industry groups, who gave the White House a map showing counties that would be out of compliance with the Clean Air Act if the stricter standards were put in place. The map showed that the rule would affect areas in the politically important 2012 election states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio.
David Roberts has to sit down:
[T]he notion that this individual sop to industry can meaningfully affect the electoral dynamics of swing states demonstrates an almost pathological ignorance of post-truth politics. … Obama cut taxes more than Bush did in his first term. Yet he's still known — even among most Democratic voters! — as a tax-and-spend, big-government liberal. And this one-off regulatory decision is supposed to cut through the clutter?
Yglesias differs on Roberts's logic:
There’s no need to assume that voters will know anything about the EPA or the rulemaking process, you just need to assume that people are generally aware of the short-term economic trends in their community. None of this changes the fact that taking a step that’s bad for public health in order to obtain a marginal advantage on Election Day is not exactly the audacity of hope, change we can believe in, or the fierce urgency of now.
Krugman employs [NYT] the Broken Window Fallacy to argue that "tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand." Steve Sexton disagrees on the economics:
[E]ven among those businesses sitting on cash reserves, it is likely that regulatory compliance costs would crowd out other expenditures (and thus other employment) as those firms sought to maintain the cash reserves they deemed optimal in the first place as a hedge against an uncertain economic future.
Armando Llorens brings it back to the politics:
[T]here is no way Obama or Dems will ever out-antiregulate Republicans. This reminds me of the eternal futile search for Values Voters to go Dem. They don't. Dems will never out "Value Voters" Republicans.
The Dish 