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The Energy Drill
Gale Collins, NYTimes
This was at a biker rally in South Dakota where McCain was wooing the crowd by demanding that Congress return to Washington and do something about the energy crisis. Demanding that Congress come back from vacation to do something is a time-honored political gambit. But is it the best line of attack for a senator who last showed up for a vote himself back in early spring? Perhaps not.
Also, there was the problem of tone. McCain has sometimes been charged with sounding like a cranky neighbor yelling at kids to get off the lawn. This time, he turned into a cranky neighbor who hires you to cut his grass and then follows you around, pointing out blades that you missed.
This is energy week on the campaign trail. In honor of the critical nature of the debate, let’s try to clear our heads of all thoughts of Paris Hilton ads, and questions of whether McCain knew, when he expressed a yen to see his wife compete in the bikers’ Miss Buffalo Chip beauty contest, that the contestants frequently went topless.
Issues. It’s all about issues.
Both McCain and Barack Obama have spent the last few days wandering around the country, scowling at gas pumps and talking up their energy plans. McCain dubbed his The Lexington Project. Obama’s seems to be called New Energy for America. If these guys really cared, wouldn’t they have come up with better names? But we digress.
Much of the debate has focused on offshore drilling. This is not actually all that critical a concern, but it has the advantage of being fairly simple. The alternative is trying to figure out whether Barack Obama’s promise to wean us from Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil in 10 years is more prone to breakage than McCain’s vow to build 45 nuclear power plants by 2030.
Obama was against ending the current ban on offshore drilling, but now he’s sort of open to it, if it’s part of a bigger energy-independence deal. This has upset a number of his supporters who desperately want a president who will adhere firmly to his positions, even when they become totally irrational.
While McCain was never violently opposed to offshore drilling, he has now embraced it as if it is not only the solution to our energy problems, but also the key to eternal salvation. Really, it’s a little scary. You can’t help wondering if he’s been captured by some kind of drilling cult.
“We’re not going to pay $4 a gallon for gas because we’re going to drill offshore, and we’re going to drill now. We’re going to drill here. We’re going to drill now!†he told the bikers. McCain is not at his best when he’s trying to rally a large group of people. He pushes too hard and sometimes winds up sounding less enthusiastic than, um, loony. It was under this exact circumstance that he volunteered Cindy for the Miss Buffalo Chip contest, though I truly do not believe he knew about the topless part.
McCain has been making this pitch quite a bit. In fact, as Obama points out, he frequently seems to be promising to drill through the floorboards of the stage where he’s speaking. Through constant repetition, he’s trying to fool the public into believing their gas prices will come down in the foreseeable future if more coastal areas are opened to drilling. And nobody really believes that, including John McCain. Bad candidate.
Obama himself has hardly been pander-free. He’s got a new plan for tapping the strategic oil reserves that’s even more meaningless than offshore drilling. And his position on nuclear power seems to boil down to an intense desire to change the subject.
“My opponent doesn’t want to drill. He doesn’t want nuclear power. He wants you to inflate your tires,†McCain continued. This is part of a weird Republican attempt to make fun of Obama for saying that if people kept their tires properly inflated it might save as much oil as we could gain by offshore drilling. To keep the subject alive, McCain supporters have been running around handing out tire gauges.
People, what sort of point do you think the Republicans are trying to make here? That Obama was being trivial? In my experience, Americans tend to regard the tires on their cars rather seriously. A tire gauge actually sounds like a handy little gift, like campaign potholders.
The first Bush administration ran public service ads in 1990, urging Americans to reduce dependence on foreign oil by checking the air pressure in their tires. But still, maybe Obama overstated. Perhaps if McCain took the argument head-on, he could prove that we would actually get more oil from offshore drilling than we could save on the tires. Of course, all he’d accomplish would be to prove that the cornerstone of his current energy policy is somewhat more effective than — air.