Let Democrats Defend The Oil Shortage They Created

There are times that I think that if the entire Republican Party leadership were to combine its entire vertebrae inventory, it still couldn’t put together one complete spine. Led by John McCain, who’s guiding principle is gaining the approval of The Washington Post, the party has lost all direction except that summarized by Malcolm Baldridge who observed that, if the Democrats proposed burning Washington to the ground, Republicans would introduce legislation that it be phased in over 5 years.

Republicans have become so reluctant to stand for anything remotely that U.S. Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon is running for reelection on Barack Obama’s coat tails, boasting that he works well with the callow junior senator from the America-hating ideological left.

I’d like to believe that the Republican retreat has been a strategic move intended to draw the Democrats out so that they will say and do things that can be used against them in the election. But I’ve seen no evidence of such cleverness. They're not called the "stupid party" for nothing.

And so, since the Republican Party has chosen to take its marching orders from Democrats, I’d like to recommend that they embrace the appellation given them by CNN correspondent, Paul Begala. During a typically classless speech last week, after calling Republicans “dirt bags,” he anointed the GOP as the “Grand Oil Party.”

Republicans should adopt that, and anoint Democrats as the NOPEs, the “No Oil Party, Ever.”

It was amusing to hear the Democrats deride John McCain’s call for increased drilling and exploration. Barack He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Middle-Named Obama dismissed it as the “failed policy of the past.”

That’s not how I recall it. When we drilled with abandon, we produced most of our own oil. Now that the Democratically controlled Congress has placed most of this country’s potential new oil fields off limits to exploration, we import most of our oil. And we have to import much of our gasoline from Venezuela. Do you think that there might be any political profit in reminding people that George Bush was right about energy policy 7 years ago?

Bush sold his plan as an aggressive drill-and-dig, anti-regulatory prescription to shoo away the tree-huggers and get the nation — and the economy — humming again.

Two months later, a New York Times/CBS poll released last week found that not only do two-thirds of the nation think Bush and Cheney are too beholden to oil companies, 60 percent think the pair made the whole energy crisis up.

Barack Obama, most Democrats, and too many Republicans have signed on to a demonstrably absurd policy of distilling corn into ethanol, a strategy that has contributed nothing to reducing oil imports (it takes almost a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of lower energy ethanol), has left us dependent upon foreign imports and has driven food prices up dramatically.

That’s what I’d call a failed policy of the past, but I’ve not yet heard a Republican say so. It’s that spine deficit again.

A year ago yesterday, on July 4, 2007, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury) and the rest of the Democratic leadership stood before an easel with a poster showing how gas prices had risen since 2001 and complained that America was too dependent on foreign oil. She promised bold initiatives to correct the problem.

In the intervening year they passed a bill banning purchases for the Strategic Reserve and threatened to sue the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for not pumping enough oil out of their oil fields. And since that day one year ago, prices have risen more than a dollar and in fact have nearly doubled since Democrats seized control of Congress in 2006.

But, have you heard one Congressional Republican other than John McCain say that we need to increase exploration and drilling? When John McCain is your boldest spokesman, your party is in trouble.

A blogger who calls himself Pollkatz has posted a chart on his website that graphs both George Bush’s approval numbers along with an inverted plot of gasoline pump prices. The two plots track nearly perfect parallels.

Considering how Democrats have obstructed every attempt to bring more domestically produced oil onto the market, it wouldn’t be hard to hang that albatross around their necks. But it would take courage, a commodity far scarcer than oil in Republican strategy sessions.

I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, Barack Obama saying that high energy prices were actually a good thing. Surely Republicans could take that video and turn it into a devastating campaign commercial. Most Americans would angrily disagree with the messiah on that one.

For decades now, Democrats have insisted that we can pursue their environmental agendas on the cheap. A dozen years ago, Bill Clinton vetoed a bill that would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, claiming that drilling there would not benefit the country for 10 years. Hmmm. By my math, we would have been seeing that oil long before Nancy Pelosi’s Oil Independence Day press conference.

Let’s see if Democrats can play defense. Democrats are losing this argument even without the Republicans engaging them in debate.