The League of Conservation voters has compiled a whole list of reasons not to vote for John McCain, some of which are nuanced and good. But they didn’t see fit to use any of them in their new anti-McCain ad that just started running in Colorado. Their attack is a lot more basic: McCain wants to take your water. The evidence for this claim lies in McCain’s ill-thought-out — and quickly repudiated — remark to the Pueblo Chieftain that the Colorado Compact, which governs the Colorado River’s allocation between the seven states that make up its watershed, “obviously needs to be renegotiated.”
“My opponent wants to steal your water” has become a popular line of attack this fall in Colorado, with Bob Schaffer getting into the act by accusing Mark Udall of having a nefarious water-grabbing agenda when he voted to protect the Clean Water Act. Even by the standards of political attacks, it’s a pretty asinine accusation. Water issues are incredibly complex — and are only going to get more so as climate change makes the West drier. They demand nuance and — yes — compromise. The last thing we need is for water to become so politically radioactive that politicians refuse to touch it.
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