President Offers Climate Change Plan; Immigration Debate Swirls

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• JIM LEHRER:

  The analysis of Shields and Brooks, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

  David, the president's global warming announcement yesterday, does it deserve praise or derision?

• DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times:

  Praise. I think there's been an evolution in the White House, not lavish, over-the-top praise, but I thought it was a step forward.

  There's been an evolution in the White House. And you've seen it over the past couple of years. You'd see one official, one government official, somebody in the Department of Energy. There's been a lot of internal movements as new studies on global warming.

  They've begun to take the issue more seriously, and so there's been this evolution of taking the issue more seriously, being more proactive about it with CAFE standards. Have they gotten to the point where they are imposing pain in order to address the global warming problem? No.

• JIM LEHRER:

  Do you see evolution, Mark?

• MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist:

  I do. And I found more significant and more revealing than the president's own change of position, which was genuine…

• JIM LEHRER:

  You thought it was a change of position?

• MARK SHIELDS:

  Oh, I sure did, yes.

• JIM LEHRER:

  OK.

• MARK SHIELDS:

  I mean, I think it's possible. I mean, not from his campaign of 2000, where, if anything, he was — you know, then he reneged, once in office, much to the consternation of Christine Todd Whitman, his first EPA director, on the question of carbon.

  But what I found fascinating — and it's sort of a Rorschach test of our own political attitude and psyche at this point — was the reaction to it. Historically, when somebody changes a position — for example, the civil rights movement, and they became pro-civil rights, there was a welcoming, open arms. "That's terrific." It changed on the anti-Vietnam War. When somebody changed, they said, "Well, what took you so long?" And there was almost a dismissiveness and exclusionary.

  And I just — I'm surprised nobody in the environmental movement that I could find reached out and said, "Thank you. Good to have you aboard, Mr. President." I mean, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, said, "We now have common ground."

  And it strikes me, once you establish that there is a problem, and we agree there's a problem, that something has to be done about it, all we're arguing about is means. And I think that's important.

• JIM LEHRER:

  Do you agree with Mark on this?

• DAVID BROOKS:

  I completely agree with that. It seems to me — as Mark says, if somebody moves in your direction, pull him in. Instead, they were slapped around. They were slapped around by all the environmental groups, and they were slapped around by the Democrats. And I think that was done because we're just in a much more partisan environment.

  And then the second fact is, is that nobody's willing to pay any economic cost for global warming. I mean, the best thing that we could have to head off global warming is higher gas prices so there will be more of an incentive to investigate new technologies. So we've got higher gas prices right now.

  What do the Democrats do? They have plans to lower gas prices, because as soon as you get an economic bite, they walk away from global warming. They say, "We're going to save you money on gas." Economics trumps environmentalism with Democrats and with Republicans, and that remains true, which is why it still pays to be pessimistic about tackling this issue.

• MARK SHIELDS:

  I would say this. I think the argument is more than a Democrat-versus-Republican point. I think what it is regulation versus non-regulation.

  And I do think that there is a resistance. The president has a natural impulse against any regulation. And we're going to do this in a voluntary way or whatever. I think he's opening himself up now, that he really is inviting standards, you know, and probably tough standards, and gasoline mileage, CAFE standards.

  The thing that bothers me is the skeptic sense that he's doing this for political purposes. Now, just say he's insincere, OK? Just say he's doing it because the G-8 meeting is next week, and he watched to take some pressure off on the environmental thing.

  Where's the political — there's a great political downside that, if it's exposed as a fraud, and they say, "Jeez, whatever you said about Bush, at least you believed him. Now you don't believe him." So that's why I think it is authentic.