The Clean Air Act is not uniformly enforced across the United States. Counties are assigned to “Non-Attainment” status and “Attainment” status. When new regulations are imposed on the dirty urban counties, these “Non-Attainment” counties do lose some jobs (as documented by Greenstone) but these jobs do not all walk to China. Instead, they “leak” to other less regulated U.S areas (the Attainment status counties). So, from a macro perspective — the job loss estimates based on micro regression methods overstate the economy wide impact. Intuitively, if ozone regulation becomes more severe, Los Angeles may lose some jobs but they will be displaced to somewhere in Mississippi.

Yglesias' argument is that:

Daley met with industry groups who showed him a map of which counties would be forced by the new rules into non-compliance. There were a bunch of counties on the map, many of which were in states such as Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that are crucial to Obama’s re-election effort.

And the result of this would be what according to Yglesias? Presumably, lost jobs right? But the piece Yglesias critiques says:

If the ozone regs had passed, several swing states would be put into noncompliance. That would have involved some fines and prompted the need for aggressive state implementation policies (SIPs). That might have upset voters, who would then be less likely to vote for Obama and, e.g., Michigan Sen. Carl Levin (D). It might have upset businesses, who would then be less likely to give money to those candidates. Now that the White House has delayed the rule, those voters won’t be upset, so they’ll be more likely to vote the right way, and businesses won’t be upset, so they’ll be more likely to give money.

I hope it’s obvious, just from laying it out, how absurd this kind of reasoning is, especially when it comes to voters. It relies on the presumption that there is a neutral media which will report to voters in those states that something was going to happen, but now isn’t, and that those voters will be attentive enough to understand that, and that the knowledge will meaningfully affect their voting behavior.

But there is no such media. There are no referees. And voters are not nearly that sophisticated. They assess politicians based on crude stereotypes, and when politicians do something counter to those stereotypes, voters simply don’t notice. That’s more true than ever in today’s fractured media landscape. The kind of people who get their news from Fox are never, ever going to give Obama credit for blocking regulations.

This strikes me as perfectly sensible political analysis. Indeed, it strikes me as generous to Daley. I think the critique's analysis of voters actually applies to Beltway political strategists as well - to wit, I bet that Daley's actual political analysis was based on "assess[ing] politic[s[ based on crude stereotypes." In this case, "tree huggers bad," "less regulation" good.

Whether that crude political assessment is right or wrong, there is no way Obama or Dems will ever out-antiregulate Republicans. This reminds me of the eternal futile search for Values Voters to go Dem. They don't. Dems will never out "Value Voters" Republicans.

Defining what the election will be about is the issue in these elections always. In the past, when elections were about Social Security, Medicare, economic fairness. etc., Democrats would be fighting the political battle on favorable ground. When it was "we need less government" type of election, Dems lose.

As a Sistah Souljah move, it seems to have been a pretty bad one. I've never focused much on environmental issues, but a significant number of voters and activists do.

This just looks like a bad crude political tradeoff. Obama needed a "school uniforms" issue here. Daley seems to have fumbled the issue.

Happily, someone in the Obama political team seems to understand this stuff better than Daley - his Thursday speech and followup, so far, have clearly set the right tone, as demonstrated by today's PPP poll (PDF):

President Obama’s jobs speech last Thursday night might have given him a boost in his bid for re-election. After tying his perpetually strongest potential challenger Mitt Romney last month, Obama again leads him, but still by a smaller margin than he beat John McCain in the national popular vote three years ago. Everyone else far underperforms McCain, who lost to the president in a near landslide. Obama tops Romney, 49-45, up from a 45-all tie in PPP’s August national poll. He leads Rick Perry, 52-41 (49-43 in August); Newt Gingrich, 53-41; and Michele Bachmann, 53- 39 (50-42). [. . .]The president’s more solid standing in the Perry and Romney horseraces comes from consolidating his party support. He was losing 13% of Democrats to each candidate in August, but only 11% to Romney and 9% to Perry now. Obama has meanwhile upped his own crossover support, from 5% to 9% of Republicans versus Romney and 10% to 11% against Perry. The president leads Perry by ten points with independents, but Romney tops Obama by two with them.

Also demonstrating that when protecting Social Security and Medicare are high profile issues Dems win, is Obama's dominance of Perry among seniors (as compared to trailing against Romney):

it appears that Perry's rhetoric on Social Security could already be causing him problems. When PPP did a national poll three weeks ago Barack Obama led Perry by only 6 points at 49-43. Now that gap has widened to 11 points at 52-41. [. . .] With seniors Romney leads Obama by 4, but Obama leads Perry by 5. No one's going to be more concerned about the Social Security issue than them, and it's safe to say a Republican can't get elected to the White House next year without doing very well with that voting group.

The winning issues for Democrats are not mysterious. The key is to make the election about those issues. Perry does it for us all by himself. The key is to make it a Dem issues election if Romney is the nominee. If Bill Daley wants to do some political strategery, that's what he should be working on, not some double backflip tree hugger bashing absurdity.