Both John McCain and Darren White are trying their darnedest to sound like Democrats. They’re scampering away from the black hole of the Bush legacy as fast as their PR Machines can carry them.

 

But the selection of presumptive Vice President Sarah Palin, the 18-month governor of Alaska, leaves no doubt that Republicans are Republicans, no matter how much they suck up to the more marginal and muddled Democrats.

 

If Sarah Palin isn’t the clincher that causes every wavering voter to pull the Democratic lever this November, no one ever will be. She’s such a modern Republican, so holier than thou art, so tied to big oil, such a creature of PR spin, she fits right in with conservative commentators and spin meisters like George Will who can make up seem down and right look left at the scratch of a pen.

 

In a recent Will commentary about the Democrats’ “naive economics,” Will said it’s naive to focus on alternative energy, discounting nuclear power as a major factor in America’s new energy economy. But that’s exactly what PNM’s recent energy planners have done in New Mexico, forecasting the company will rely more and more on alternative energy to supplement coal and natural gas and deciding not pursue mega-expensive, glacially slow nuclear power start ups. Energy is all about incentives and subsidies. But more of that later.

 

Sarah Palin to the contrary, I expect we’ll see more Republicans trying to sound like Democrats over the next months, echoing Darren White at his victory speech on primary night, when the Republican candidate for the First Congressional District in New Mexico tore into President Bush and the last four years of economic disaster like a DNC TV spot.

 

But this is all par for the course in the madcap, surreal elections of 2008. The only person around who seems to espouse the straight Republican line is a person hardly anyone outside of Alaska has heard of.

 

Sarah Palin admits to not knowing much about Iraq, or all that much about what a vice president might actually do. But the heartbeat-away-from-the-hot-seat hockey mom knows she doesn’t believe in global warming, knows she doesn’t believe in women’s reproductive rights, knows she thinks the Endangered Species Act is for sissies, knows she’s a Rush Limbaugh-like advocate of Big Bad Oil and is not a supporter of home-grown renewable energy independence.

 

Palin is what John McCain and Darren White are really like. They are Republicans. As hard as they try not to seem like Sarah Palin, they all belong to modern Republicanism, the party of Karl Rove and Pat Robertson, and no amount of spin can make it any different.

 

Should McCain’s health falter and Palin become the president, everything that every environmentalist, every alternative energy advocate, every women’s rights activist, every religious person of ecumenical leanings, and every Bill of Rights champion could go right down the drain. And they all know it. Perhaps Palin has galvanized the Republican base, but she’s galvanized everyone else as well, spunky and charming though she may be.

 

It would be like having Sean Hannity for president.

 

Like all Bush apologists, from Pete Domenici to Darren White to Steve Pearce, George Will, Sarah Palin, and John McCain deny change even when it’s snapping at their heels. They look at the defunct past and see a glorious future, and propose to do exactly the same things that caused the ruination that discredits their point of view.

 

Will and many other Republicans, along with some rightish Democrats, believe in the l950s view of atoms of peace, harnessing nuclear energy for industrial purposes to assuage the guilt of the nuclear industrial complex and science-for-hires who, at one time, helped to put some 70,000 nuclear warheads around the world, from Russia to North Dakota.

 

Will thinks it’s naive to suppose that America can wean itself from foreign oil without using nuclear energy in large quantities. He thinks that alternative energy sources, and cars that run on something other than petroleum, are also naive without nuclear power. He discounts the dangers of uranium mining, the arms proliferation implications in reprocessing spent fuel rods, and even the sound strategy of storing spent fuel on site in hardened containers, rather than waiting for decades for a subterranean repository to become politically viable, and then trucking the stuff all over the country to get its immense tonnage underground.

 

He doesn’t want to tell us that Big Nuke and Big Oil are the nation’s most heavily subsidized energy industries. The nuclear industry, alone, is protected from collapse by the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, a no-fault insurance program. Any claim against a nuclear power company over $10 billion is covered by the taxpayer, and anything less is covered by an industry supported indemnity fund, backed by the federal government. It’s been estimated that a Chernobyl-like accident in the United States would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

 

Unlike Will, scientists advising the British government on nuclear power in 2005 concluded that not only weren’t nuclear reactors a solution to global warming, but that nuclear power is “a limited, inflexible, expensive, and potentially dangerous energy source which creates unique problems.” They argued for alternative energy subsidies rather than a new generation of reactors, according to SourceWatch.

 

But Republicans in Congress have been foot dragging on extending tax credits for renewable energy companies past the Dec. 31 deadline. The loss of those tax credits, according to The Associated Press, could cause operations like Schott Solar in Albuquerque to lose perhaps 1,500 jobs and a half a billion dollars in investments.

 

Watching the tax credit debate will give us all a clue about what might happen in a Palin presidency in which all the incentives go to dottering Big Nuke and Big Oil with nothing left over for the future.