As New Castle County Executive Chris Coons gets ready for that daily commute to Washington, D.C., traces of one of the more unfortunate sideshows from the Senate campaign continue to pop up on the blogosphere.
The canard from the campaign of Christine O’Donnell and her enthusiastic out-of-state Twitter robo bloggers went something like this: Coons is a member of the Gore family and their company will profit handsomely from cap-and-trade legislation that will cost each American family thousands of dollars. One commercial featured a picture of a speedboat. They also threw in the fact that Gore actually operated overseas and might be exporting jobs.
Cap and trade is essentially a way to cut pollution via credits that traded among companies. It has become a huge issue with many in the tea party movement, particularly those who don’t buy into global warming. There are legitimate concerns about the legislation, given the fragile state of the economy, but the level of misinformation is breathtaking. Coons, by the way, is the stepson of one of Gore family members and worked as a lawyer for the company. That sent the opposition to work looking for evil connections between Gore and hot button issues, especially since Coons was not afraid to tout his stint at Gore as evidence of his free market credentials.
What Gore, DuPont and many other companies are doing is looking for ways to profit from the swing toward alternative energy sources. While DuPont thinks big, as it pushes for a breakthrough in alternative fuels, Gore is working to use its knowledge base to offer some of the building blocks for those breakthroughs. By the way, this effort will go on, regardless of the political climate in the United States. Other nations, including China, will continue to push for alternative fuels and energy sources and a company that does not attempt to tap those opportunities could find itself irrelevant a decade for now.
Could Gore come up with a discovery that would produce billions of dollars in revenue? Never say never, but it is highly unlikely. The company looks for technologies that meet specialized needs and operates with a team-based system that is highly efficient at bringing products to market, but does not bet the ranch on any one area. It results in a steady stream of innovative technologies that range from guitar strings to medical implants that can patch up a hernia or a blood vessel.
Gore also is committed to manufacturing its own products, with one of its biggest manufacturing and R&D clusters in Cecil County, Md., New Castle County, DE and Chester County, Pa.
All of this may seem like nitpicking, but illustrates the noise we saw coming out of the past campaign. For the sake of swinging a few votes either way, a lot of economic misinformation was knowingly put on the airwaves. This came from both ends of the political spectrum and even the middle, if the candidate got desperate.
Long after the election that misinformation is likely to persist, especially as bloggers continue to repeat the same tall tales.
As for W.L. Gore, it won’t hurt that a family member is in the U.S. Senate. But the real benefit may be that the exclusive club on Capitol Hill now has someone who knows the link between research and development, product development and manufacturing and how that formula works in a complex global economy.
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