Mitt Romney’s supporters have been dogging Governor Perry on him acting as Texas campaign manager for Al Gore’s abortive 1988 presidential run as one of the Seven Dwarfs. The critique runs, dishonestly I might add, that Al Gore was an environmental kook then, ergo Perry is an environmental kook. Because something.

This is just balderdash. In 1988, Al Gore was a moderate-conservative senator from Tennessee who was a very attractive candidate. His descent into self parody started much later.

I rarely resort to publishing oppo material circulated by campaigns but I am making an exception today. File this particular story under “sauce for the gander.”

If personnel equal policy we have a hint from Mitt Romney’s appointments while governor of Massachusetts what his administration will look like. Van Jones may not be recalled but it may not make much difference.

In 2003, Romney chose a hard core environmental activist to be Secretary of Commonwealth Development. In this position he was charged with developing a scheme to restrict “greenhouse gas” emissions. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Just days after his 2002 election, Mr. Romney hired Douglas Foy, one of the state’s most prominent environmental activists, and put him in charge of supervising four state agencies. … With Mr. Foy by his side, Mr. Romney joined activists outside an aging, coal-fired plant in 2003 to show his commitment to the emissions caps. “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people, and that plant, that plant kills people,” he said.

But when it became obvious that he would not win reelection as governor, Romney set his sights on the GOP presidential nomination. In remaking himself he repudiated his own secretary carrying out his own plan.

Significantly, two of Romney’s appointments have how found a home in the Obama White House.

Gina McCarthy, the chief EPA clean air regulator, also worked as an environmental regulator for then-Governor Romney. Her role now is as point guard (nyuk) in the Obama Administrations fight to make coal fired electric generating plants extinct.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has taken most of the fire from Republicans as her agency rolls out a slew of controversial new climate and clean air rules. But McCarthy, the EPA assistant administrator of the Office of Air and Radiation, has taken on much of the heavy lifting of writing, structuring, and implementing the rules.

“Lisa’s the coach and Gina’s the quarterback” in the work of rolling out new clean air regulations, said Daniel Weiss, an energy and climate policy expert at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “She’s running the plays, improvising on the line.”

Another Romney environmental adviser in the effort to regulate “greenhouse gases” is now Obama’s Director of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren. Dr. Holdren has some exotic views:

President Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, “compulsory sterilization,” and the creation of a “Planetary Regime” that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet — controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.

[…]

Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.

To help achieve those goals, they formulate a “world government scheme” they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world’s resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an “armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.

Holdren has gone to some lengths to repudiate those views but one has to question “confirmation conversions.”

So Rick Perry supported Al Gore for president in 1988. Romney’s environmental policy team now works for Obama. Sauce for the goose. Sauce for the gander.