“The American people… just like your teenage kids aren’t acting
in a way that they should act,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in
2009. Chu was comparing Americans to heedless youth for resisting
the left’s environmentalist decrees. The comment came as the Energy
Department embarked on a nationwide tour of 6,000 schools to hector
children about “climate change” and as it propagandized the
“broader public about how important clean energy industries are to
our competitive position in the global economy.”
Lecturing the American people on responsibility and global
economics was a comfortable stance for Chu at the time. Americans
were expected to genuflect before his lab coat. He was, after all,
an unimpeachable man of science — a “Nobel prize-winning”
physicist, as the Obama administration repeated with comic
frequency. How could he possibly be wrong about the promise of
green jobs? Besides, another brilliant thinker, Van Jones, had
vouched for Chu’s program. (Obama saw in this aspiring Marxist an
expert on what makes economies hum and made him “green jobs
czar.”)
But now Chu finds himself sitting before Congress as the
subject of lectures on irresponsibility, having been exposed by the
Solyndra scandal as far more reckless in his spending and judgment
than any wayward youth. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and his
patron, the Nobel Prize-winning president, pooled their
intelligence to come up with a loan guarantee program that, by the
time all is said and done, will have squandered billions of
taxpayer dollars on bankrupt companies tied to their political and
ideological cronies.
Convinced of the rectitude of their environmentalist
cause, the two remain as unrepentant as arrogant teens. “No, I
don’t,” said Obama when asked in October if he regretted his
support for Solyndra. “I’ll stand by those words,” Chu
said on NPR this week when asked about his remarks at the
Solyndra groundbreaking. Chu had bragged about the “unprecedented
speed” with which he was granting loans to “promising” companies
that “hesitant investors” weren’t supporting.
Those hesitant investors look pretty good right now and
Obama and Chu look stupid. But in their minds they still stand on
the side of the angels and thus should be exempt from any
criticism. Judge us by our intentions, they basically say. Their
attitude about “green jobs” is the same as their approach to
“climate change” regulations — they consider them the “right thing
to do” no matter how much economic destruction might follow in
their wake. Of course, they don’t think those adverse consequences
should touch them or their political donors. Obama and Chu made
sure to leave the Solyndra bill for the American taxpayer rather
than George Kaiser.
Obama and Chu claim that they could not have anticipated
the company’s problems (one would have needed “clairvoyant”
hindsight, Chu has said) even as they boast of the brave risk they
took by supporting it. “And what we always understood was that not
every single business is going to succeed in clean energy,” Obama
has said. It was a noble failure, they say — a noble failure that
they didn’t want anyone to know about. Hence, the frantic attempted
bailouts and restructuring of the deal. And now it has come out
that Chu’s Department of Energy instructed Solyndra to conceal its
layoffs until after the November 2, 2010 elections. Solyndra
complied, releasing the information on November 3.
The press continues to indulge Chu’s man-of-science
routine even as all the evidence trickling out shows him to be a
political hack and hubristic ideologue. Press accounts that appear
designed to save his job cast him as “naïve,” as if he were too
busy fiddling around with experiments to participate in any
political mischief. The truth is that he likes to play the trendy
pol. The unfolding scandal into which he has fallen is exactly what
one would expect from an overrated scientist with that personality
type.
An egotistical nerd excited to be a political player and
drunk with the power of environmentalist ideology was bound to get
into this kind of mess while pooh-poohing the very warnings from
lesser mortals that could have saved him from it. OMB officials had
told him Solyndra was a bad bet but Chu knew better. Chu figured
that he could teach himself any subject, including venture
capitalism.
It is clear from Chu’s NPR interview that the internal
White House e-mail containing advice from a former Obama campaign
adviser to the effect that Chu is politically and managerially
inept and should be sent back to the lab has hurt his pride. He
implied his critic was a nobody who didn’t know his
talents or his adroit handling of the Energy Department. Yet this
departmental visionary finds himself in the awkward position of
having to explain the Solyndra debacle on grounds other than
political or ideological favoritism. Thinking that innocent
incompetence is an easier and more respectable explanation than
hubris and corruption, the Nobel Prize winner is essentially
pleading stupidity.
