The following article ran in The Waco Tribune-Herald on Sunday, April 3, 2011.
When it comes to strange political bedfellows, you’d have to search long and hard to find as unique a pair as President Barack Obama and arch-conservative entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens. One is a smoothly articulate, Harvard-educated attorney with liberal credentials. The other is a blunt, talespinning West Texan (OK — by way of Oklahoma) who disdains Democrats and has long sought to obliterate them.
But party politics is one thing. Crafting long-term solutions to ensure your nation’s survival in an increasingly hostile and uncertain world is quite another. At least, that’s Pickens’ credo nowadays.
He’s even sworn off funding federal political campaigns of GOP pals just to bolster the chances of an energy plan he created, now gaining bipartisan favor. It’s an endeavor he’s sunk $82 million into publicizing.
Last week, while Republicans were losing no time castigating the president for his energy plan to wean our nation off foreign oil, Pickens came down squarely on the president’s side. The morning of the president’s speech, Pickens was bound for Waco and Baylor University to talk about the Pickens Plan that stresses, among other things, tax credits for our nation’s trucking industry to shift to big trucks fueled by cheap, abundant, clean-burning, all-American natural gas rather than dirty and increasingly expensive diesel.
Transportation uses two-thirds of our nation’s oil. About one-third of all oil is consumed by the 8 million heavy-use trucks on our highways. If our nation can switch to a fleet powered by natural gas, of which Pickens says we have a century’s worth here at home, our dependence on OPEC can be cut significantly.
Obama included Pickens’ proposal in his Wednesday speech on energy. That may be enough to work wonders in Congress, increasingly prone to polarization. Pickens vows his proposal will be passed and signed into law this year: “Damn right.”
During his press conference, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was among those who gave the president no credit for offering an energy plan. But when I mentioned the inclusion of ol’ T. Boone’s proposal , the senator warmed some: “I think Mr. Pickens is on to something.”
Obama thinks so. Pickens says the two have talked face-to-face only once, back when Obama was running for president in 2008. Just a month after Pickens unveiled the Pickens Plan, candidate Obama met the oilman-turned-corporate raider-turned-energy guru in Reno at Obama’s request to discuss it. The meeting obviously made an impression on the young senator. Later, after Obama was elected president, he happened to run into Pickens’ wife Madeleine at an event.
“I want you to tell your husband that I appreciate what he’s doing on energy and for America,” the president said. “I was very impressed with your husband when he pulled out a Sharpie and wrote (the points of the Pickens Plan) all over the tablecloth.”
Pickens says he wishes he had kept the tablecloth and gotten Obama to sign it: “What a nice piece of memorabilia that would have been.”
He champions the Pickens Plan as nothing less than patriotic, fundamental to our national security.
“I’m for anything American,” he said during his stop in Waco, part of a college tour to tout his plan. “My No. 1 issue is security. I want off OPEC oil. We’re buying oil from the enemy and we’re paying for both sides of the war. I don’t like to look stupid. And we look stupid.”
Pickens acknowledges that, yes, his business interests would benefit if natural gas emerged as a dominant fuel in the nation’s oil-powered economy. He also notes he’s 82. He likes to recall how Microsoft chairman Bill Gates phoned him to suggest he become part of a group of entrepreneurs who pledged 50 percent of their wealth to charity. Gates was taken aback when Pickens said he had already pledged 90 percent.
He jokes about his mortality, recalling what a doctor told him: “The good news is you’re going to live to be 114. The bad news is you won’t be able to see or hear.”
Till then, we’ll be seeing and hearing a whole lot more of T. Boone.