I can’t let Obama’s San Francisco Chronicle quote on coal go by without sharing a couple of comments from inside the belly of the MSM beast. Because the story is as much about the media as it is about Obama’s green radicalism.

Michelle Malkin asks: “Why didn’t the Chronicle transcribe their meeting in the nine months between then and now? Did they realize how damaging this could be to Obama’s hopes?”

The answer is likely no, they didn’t realize it would be damaging. This is San Francisco, after all! But nationally, as well, the collective mindset of the MSM today — where 90 percent of newsrooms are Democratic — is that coal is a dinosaur industry. It is “dirty.” It is non-renewable. It is so yesterday. Unschooled in energy economics, most reporters truly believe you can run the U.S. economy on wind power. That Obama would bankrupt coal-heavy utilities is an uncontroversial — in fact, an encouraging — statement.

The more telling point is that McCain’s opposition research never uncovered this video despite the fact, as Malkin notes, that it “has been available on their website since January 17th of this year.”

Like his (former) friends in the press, McCain has swallowed the green kool-aid and has been an outspoken advocate for cap-and-trade. Until Sarah Palin got her teeth into Biden’s rope-line coal comments (“Mine, baby, mine” she told an enthusiastic crowd in Florida — yes, Florida! — over the weekend) — the McCain campaign approached global warming as a bridge-building opportunity to independent voters, not as a club with which to hit Obama over the head.

On Michigan talk radio this morning, ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd was asked by host Frank Beckmann how Obama — based on the evidence of his past — would govern.

Replied Dowd: “I think he’s more of a smarter politician than an ideologue.”

Well sure, if you ignore the evidence.