Obama's Cat in the Hat balancing act on the Keystone XL pipeline

President Obama must feel like the Cat in the Hat--who performed a super-feline balancing act in the beloved children's book.

Canadians are extracting petroleum from the Athabasca Oil Sands in Alberta and they are eager to transport it here through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

But as the Washington Post pointed out on Sunday, greens and their Hollywood enablers oppose the project:

By August a group of environmental leaders that included [environmentalist Bill] McKibben was able to enlist more than a thousand opponents willing to be arrested outside the White House, including actresses Daryl Hannah and Margot Kidder. The two-week demonstration prompted a flurry of calls between White House offices and State, sources said, as administration officials asked to be briefed about the project's status...State Department officials have said they will issue a final decision on the permit by the end of the year; on Nov. 6, McKibben and other activists plan to ring the White House with placards of Obama's words from the 2008 campaign, including his pledge to free the United States from "the tyranny of oil."

But Big Labor, another key Obama ally, supports Keystone XL.

Here's what's interesting - with environmentalists preparing to battle major unions like the Teamsters, President Obama is in a bigger box than previously reported. And the story appeared on the same day the President's top aides, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, publicly stated that President Obama would fully embrace the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement as a re-election strategy - a decision that would seemingly place his administration on the side of activists in opposing the pipeline project.

And it appears Hillary Clinton backs the pipeline:

In mid-October, Clinton told an audience at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club that she and others in the administration were "inclined" to give TransCanada the permit, adding, "We're either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada."

The president is traveling through Virginia and North Carolina repeating his demand that Congress pass his jobs bill. But what about the pipeline, which will create thousands of jobs? It's easier for the president to maintain a delicate balancing act when the unemployment rate is going down.

Build it and the jobs will come.

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