[Democratic National Convention] While many in the party can't fathom how a Hillary supporter could be sore enough to actually cast a spite-vote for McCain just for their candidate being dissed on the presidential and vice-presidential nomination, one 74-year-old PUMA (standing for Party Unity My Ass) believes there's a very good reason to vote for McCain over Obama."[McCain] will be a lame duck president," says Carol Anderson, who has set up her small PUMA camp in Denver's Civic Station Park. Anderson, a lifelong Democrat, believes a Democratic-controlled congress will buffer any damaging conservative policies McCain might unleash. While she supported Clinton, she doesn't believe in the change Obama offers, especially with energy policy.
"Obama voted for the [2005] Cheney-Bush energy bill to set up liquefied gas terminals and 42 nuclear power plants in Washington and Oregon. Cheney hatched this bill in his office with Ken Lay and other big energy moguls, secretly. John McCain didn't vote for it, Hillary didn't vote for it, Obama did."
The issue will resurface, seeing as how the 2005 bill Obama supported included sizable tax breaks for big oil companies-- an issue Obama is working hard in his campaign to say differentiates him from his opponent. Obama has said he supported the bill "reluctantly" because it also diverted ethanol funds to his state of Illinois.
Anderson says the natural gas stations the legislation earmarked for her state of Washington are volatile and dangerous. "If one of them blows up, it will be worse than any nuclear holocaust in 100 miles," she says.
Anderson also doesn't feel the connection to Obama -- especially since his appearance at a Washington town hall meeting, where he was asked about Hanford, the site of one of the nation's oldest nuclear waste dump sites, retaining waste from the original Manhattan Project of the 1940s. Activists worry the clean-up has been stymied for too long.
"When he was asked 'What are you going to do about Hanford?' " Anderson says, "he said 'What's Hanford?' " (You can check that video moment out here.)
"I can't have this know-nothing guy as president," Anderson says. (Eric S. Peterson)
