Some Democrats running this fall are claiming that they are the real champions of the middle class.

They therefore have a few things to explain to voters about their president.

One is why raising their energy costs is good for them. From Newsmax:

The Obama administration’s ongoing assault on fossil fuels is hurting the poor, says Stephen Moore, chief economist for the Heritage Foundation and a board member of the Wall Street Journal.

“The left has this assault against . . . drilling and nuclear power and natural gas and all of the ways that we get cheap and abundant electricity,” Moore told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

“Their agenda is to make electricity power much more expensive by making us buy it from things like windmills and solar power, which is extraordinarily expensive.

“[This] is going to hurt the poor way more than it’s going to hurt rich people because the poor are the ones who are going to be priced out of the electricity market,” he said Tuesday.

Moore said low-income families have been devastated by the government’s regulation of coal operations.

“You can go to whole towns in states like Kentucky and West Virginia, in Ohio and Pennsylvania and . . . even Virginia that have been essentially wiped out because of this, you know, wacko assault against fossil fuels,” he said.

“The people who are hurt are people who make $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year. These aren’t rich people, and there are whole towns, literally whole towns [that] have been decimated by this radical environmental agenda.” 

Here’s how it works: Energy is a big component of the cost of everything you buy, both in creating it and in transporting it. If things become more expensive, people buy fewer of them. If  people buy fewer things, unemployment increases. It’s unclear to me how increasing unemployment helps the middle and lower-than-middle class.

Tied to that is Obama’s obsession with global warming — I mean, climate change — I mean destroying capitalism. Herman Cain:

I’ve said it many times but it bears repeating as often as is necessary: Global warmists are really government expansionsts, and global warming is merely their chosen rationale of the moment for the things they really want to do. Try to make any distinction between the left’s preferred “response to climate change” and the left’s agenda in general: Higher taxes, more government control of industry, more enforcement power for federal bureaucrats.

You can’t. There is no distinction to be made. This is what they want regardless of circumstances. If global warming wasn’t the rationale for it, a shortage of Popsicle sticks would be.

And Secretary of State John Kerry clumsily revealed that in a commencement speech at Boston College:

“The solution is actually staring us in the face. It is energy policy. Make the right energy policy choices and America can lead a $6 trillion market with four billion users today and growing to nine billion users in the next 50 years,” Mr. Kerry said in his commencement address, referring to climate change. Then came the odd poser.

“If we make the necessary efforts to address this challenge—and supposing I’m wrong or scientists are wrong, 97% of them all wrong—supposing they are, what’s the worst that can happen?” Mr. Kerry said. “We put millions of people to work transitioning our energy, creating new and renewable and alternative; we make life healthier because we have less particulates in the air and cleaner air and more health; we give ourselves greater security through greater energy independence—that’s the downside.”

Well. Not that I would expect a left-wing ideologue like John Kerry to understand this, but that’s actually quite some downside. You manipulate the movement of capital from reliable energy sources to those that are immature and unproven. You increase people’s energy bills. You soak up taxpayer money subsidizing industries that are not viable enough to operate on their own, likely getting the same results we’ve seen so far with green energy subsidies (Solyndra, Fisker, ethanol, etc.). You impose crushing new costs on manufacturers. You turn bureaucrats loose to enforce all this, knowing full well that the culture of the federal government is to use such power to endlessly harass chosen targets.

And oh by the way, you put yourself at a competitive disadvantage globally because – regardless of what any treaty might say – other nations have shown they will only hue to this insanity until it starts costing them their economic viability.

Who do manufacturers employ? Not rich people. Kerry, to no one’s surprise, overstates the employment potential of so-called green energy (birds killed by wind turbines are unavailable for comment) and ignores the unemployment that will result.