JOEL KOTKIN: How Fossil-Fuel Democrats Became An Endangered Species. “President Obama’s heavy-handed regulation of the booming old-energy economy—the moratorium on offshore drilling following the BP spoil, the decision to block the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the prospect of a fracking ban—and his embrace of green-energy policies has played well in the solidly Democratic post-industrial coastal economies that he also depends on for fund-raising. But it’s left him with few friends in the energy belt that spans the Great Plains, the Gulf Coast, Appalachia and now some parts of the old rustbelt, despite his election-year claims of an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policy. It’s a far cry from Bill Clinton, whose close ties with Great Plains and Gulf Coast Democrats and energy producers there helped him twice carry Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia—all states that appear to be solidly behind Romney this year. . . . Nowhere is the element of choice inherent in energy policy more evident than in California, home to five of the nation’s twelve largest oil fields and energy reserves equal to those of Nigeria, the world’s tenth-largest producer. As high-paying energy jobs swell payrolls in the Great Plains, the Intermountain West and parts of the Gulf, the Golden State has double-digit unemployment, a collapsed inland economy and a series of bankrupt municipalities. Amidst a great national energy boom, California’s energy production has remained stunted even as the state’s draconian “renewable” energy mandates are slated to drive up its already high electricity rates. The state’s high cost of energy has impacted industry: despite its vast human and natural resources, the Golden State, with 12 percent of the nation’s population received barely 2 percent of the country’s manufacturing expansions last year.”

Key bit: “As economic forecaster Bill Watkins recently told an audience in hard-hit Santa Maria: ‘If you were in Texas, you’d be rich.’”