really sad.” Betsy Taylor, a philanthropic adviser to climate donors and foundations, helped organize more than eighty-five donors and volunteers for the 2008 campaign to send a letter to Obama urging him to reject Keystone. Taylor echoed McKibben’s theme: “If the president waffles on this or fails to act decisively, it will send a huge chill through the community. Will people vote for him? Yes. Will they work for him, raise money for him and activate their networks for him? Not likely.”21
To maintain pressure, 350.org scheduled a mass rally at the White House on January 24, 2012, only days before Obama’s expected decision on the permit. But on January 18 the president preempted this event by denying the permit. “The rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans,” Obama announced, “prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment.” McKibben, astutely using the positive side of the fear-and-loathing strategy, responded to Obama’s denial by saying, “The knock on Barack Obama from many quarters has been that he’s too conciliatory. But here, in the face of a naked political threat from Big Oil to exact ‘huge political consequences,’ he’s stood up strong.” Obama’s decision allowed TransCanada to make another application for the pipeline, but McKibben noted that even a “re-route will do nothing to address the climate impacts of burning tar sands, the economic downside of continuing our addiction to oil, the risks the pipeline poses to other states along the route, or the political influence Big Oil continues to use to override the interests of the American people. If this pipeline comes back, so will we.”22
The Keystone XL campaign illustrates how far the environmental movement’s strategic savvy has come since Bill Clinton’s first term. Environmental groups that did not want to burn bridges with the Clinton-Gore administration over the East Liverpool incinerator chose a different course here. Part of this shift was due to the framing of Keystone as a national and even international climate change issue that demanded an all-out fight. But equally important was that environmental groups had learned that giving politicians a pass on breaking environmental commitments to one constituency leads to further betrayals. As a result of environmentalists adopting a clear fear-and-loathing approach, a “done deal” for Big Oil unraveled and green political clout grew.
On February 17, 2013, an estimated 50,000 anti-Keystone activists convened at the Washington Monument and marched past the White House in the largest climate change rally in U.S. history. Primarily organized by the Sierra Club, 350.org, and the Hip Hop Caucus, the event urged President Obama to move “ForwardOnClimate,” cleverly using the president’s 2012 campaign theme of “Forward” to hold him accountable on climate change. Four days earlier, on the day after Obama vowed to combat climate change in his 2013 State of the Union address, the Sierra Club engaged in civil disobedience for the first time in its 120-year history when its executive director, Michael Brune, was among dozens of activists arrested at a White House anti-Keystone protest. Keystone had become the key environmental litmus test for the president, and a case study for how green activists should hold politicians accountable.
NO SE PUEDE ON IMMIGRANT RIGHTS
Like environmentalists, immigrant rights activists began the Obama presidency with high hopes. Their chief goal was comprehensive immigration reform that would create a path to citizenship for 8 to 12 million primarily Latino undocumented immigrants. Momentum appeared to be on the activists’ side. The movement had brought millions into the streets in support of comprehensive reform in the spring of 2006. In 2008, a higher Latino voter turnout helped Obama win four states that had gone Republican four years earlier (Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Florida). Many believed that the Republican Party could not afford to sacrifice Latino votes in future elections by opposing immigration reform, and President Obama was publicly committed to its enactment. Immigrant rights advocates regarded Obama as an ally; his administration would provide the movement its first real test of its ability to hold a Democratic president accountable.
Unfortunately, as too often happens after a long-disenfranchised constituency gains additional power and helps elect a political ally, immigrant rights leaders failed to confront Obama with the fear-and-loathing approach necessary for success. Like San Francisco tenant leaders after helping elect Art Agnos as mayor, immigrant rights activists continued to trust Obama well after it became clear that he would not honor his commitments. The president had close relations with many of the key immigrant rights movement stakeholders, including the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Andy Stern, who often talked about his many invitations to the White House. These relationships and other factors allowed Obama to entirely ignore comprehensive immigration reform during his critical first year in office, and, even worse, to set new records for deportations.
Danger signs about Obama’s commitment to enacting comprehensive immigration reform emerged even before he took office when he selected Arizona governor Janet Napolitano to be secretary of homeland security. Napolitano had maintained popularity by allowing antiimmigrant attitudes to fester in her state, which was becoming notorious for the racist outrages of Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. Obama’s appointment of Napolitano reflected a defensive strategy that sought to reduce opposition to comprehensive reform by addressing opponents’ demands for strengthened border control and increased deportations. Napolitano’s replacement as Arizona governor was a Republican, so Obama’s appointment of her also increased the power of the state’s anti-Latino forces.
Immigrant rights activists understood that getting an economic stimulus bill through Congress was President Obama’s first priority. They also recognized that his next priority was health care, but were told that this would not sidetrack work on immigration reform. Here’s where activists made their first mistake. As the above examples from San Francisco and the Clinton administration show, politicians use their first months in office to test activists to see what they can get away with. And what Obama learned during this period was that he could maintain good relations with key immigration reform leaders without providing a specific timetable for action on their top legislative goal.
Obama announced in early April 2009 that he would begin looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal in that year. A senior administration Official announced that President Obama “plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, and over the summer will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.” This timetable, the Official said, was consistent with pledges Obama had made to Hispanic groups in the previous year’s campaign, including the promise that comprehensive reform would be a priority of his first year in office. Immigrant rights leader and Congress member Luis Gutierrez discussed Obama’s approach to comprehensive reform at the 2009 UNITE HERE convention in Chicago in late June. Gutierrez, a Chicago representative who went way back with Obama, described a serious meeting he and others had had with the president in which they had expressed concern about his lack of action on immigration reform. Assuring his audience that Obama remained committed to the issue, the congressman said he expected a comprehensive measure to pass by Christmas. While echoing activists’ disappointment over the slow pace of progress, he and the larger movement still believed the president would come through.23
Gutierrez expressed this measured optimism before Obama turned health care reform over to “moderate” Republicans, and before Tea Party activists disrupted town hall meetings in August as part of a concerted strategy to derail health care. When Congress returned to the Capitol in September 2009, health care was the talk of the town, and immigration reform was completely off the political radar. This undermined faith in the Obama administration’s early assurances that health care would not crowd out other priorities. Activists responded by having Gutierrez introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill on October 13. The introduction was accompanied by large rallies in Washington, D.C., and twenty other cities, but the effort appeared to be more of a strategy by immigrant rights groups to placate an increasingly anxious base than a serious step toward enacting comprehensive reform.
As
