For the better part of the past two months, the president has had it pretty easy. We’ve seen some decent jobs numbers. He has not really been in the public eye while the media have focused on the GOP’s internecine struggles. He hasn’t really had to play defense.
Until gas prices started rising. And this reminds us of a lesson we learned in the brief window of the 2008 presidential campaign when he fell behind John McCain in the polls, Barack Obama is not good on defense.
With gas prices rising on his watch, he lashes out at Republicans:
Now, some politicians they see this as a political opportunity. I know you’re shocked by that. (Laughter.) Last week, the lead story in one newspaper said, “Gasoline prices are on the rise and Republicans are licking their chops.” (Laughter.) That’s a quote. That was the lead. “Licking their chops.” Only in politics do people root for bad news, do they greet bad news so enthusiastically. You pay more; they’re licking their chops.
You can bet that since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their 3-point plan for $2 gas. And I’ll save you the suspense. Step one is to drill and step two is to drill. And then step three is to keep drilling. (Laughter.) We heard the same line in 2007 when I was running for President. We hear the same thing every year. We’ve heard the same thing for 30 years.
Well, the American people aren’t stupid.
No, we’re not stupid, Mr. President. If Republican see rising gas prices as a political opportunity, you can take some credit, as Doug Powers reminds us in linking this video:
Or maybe they took the lead from your fellow Democrat, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she called for hearings when the nationwide average price for a gallon of gas was $3.07:
And let’s not forget about the woman whom you tapped to head the Democratic National Committee. (That link via Instapundit.)
And no, Mr. President, the Republican energy plan is not just, “Drill, Baby, Drill” — though that, to be sure, is one of its key components. Yesterday, I received an e-mail where Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads GPS, summarized the conservative opposition to the president’s energy policy:
Since taking office, President Obama has blocked the Keystone XL pipeline, blocked offshore oil exploration, blocked new coal plants and wants to shut down old ones, is increasingly hostile to natural gas exploration, and even hired an energy secretary whose stated goal was to double gas prices. In two days, Obama has released tax ‘reform’ that actually complicates the tax code, and an energy plan that is just doublespeak and looks desperate. His energy policy can be distilled down to four words: ‘none of the above.’
In response to our energy needs, Republicans want to do more than just drill. And if they’re politicizing gas prices, they’re just following your lead. And that of one of the onetime House Speaker whose leadership you commended. And the woman you tapped to head your party’s national committee.
“We’ve seen some decent jobs numbers.”
1.2 million people leaving the workforce is not “decent”.
That’s one good sized city that just up and vanished from the planet to give us a false low of 8.3% whiche even if it was accurate is an atrocious number.
Add to that people still remember the “Under my plan Energy Prices will necessarily skyrocket” and they are starting to note that even though they claim no inflation or low inflation (especially to those they decided to give no COLA to like those on SocSec) their food is higher for the most part to go along with the gas and more and more are feeling the pinch.
All the candidates for the repubs need to stop answering the stupid questions other than to point out the bias and slam the economy every single time.
This is the same President who told our closest economic-ally to sell their oil and gas to China by refusing to license the Keystone pipeline to our Texas gasoline refineries.
Also, I read an interesting financial analysis today that posited that it’s not the price of oil that’s going up…but the US dollar being further devalued against the World’s most fungible and universal commodity; oil. While the price of Oil and the price of gold have tracked each-other for most of the 20th-century.
Obama’s solution to energy problems: http://obamaoverlords.ytmnd.com/
That is all.
Obama still sounds vulnerable on the campaign trail when the subject is not contraception.
Once we get to a One on One match up, the excuse making will become even more pronounced.
The GOP candidates should be wrapping the Keystone XL pipeline around Obama’s neck (Apologies for “racist” imagery). Yeah, the dumb liberal saps will parrot the administration’s phony talking points about energy production but the fact is the Obama regime shut down Keystone XL, shut down new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, cancelled drilling contracts on Federal lands, all the while guaranteeing billions in loans to Brazil so the Brazilians could develop their offshore oil fields.
Liberal idiots will support the president regardless of what he does, but independents can be swayed by reason.
Seems the current chairwoman of the DNC was singing a different tune about gas prices when GWB was president:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/02/23/flashback_wasserman_schultz_rails_against_high_gas_prices_under_bush.html
Obama should have become a sea captain. Apparently he doesn´t mind going down with his ship. His instransigence on oil is going to take him down. If he would approve the Keystone Project. approve drilling in ANWR and sign leases for offshore drilling he would become a hero and practically guarantee his reelection. It would send a message to OPEC that we´re going to be less dependent on their oil which will ultimately lower prices in the futures market and have positive results at the pump.
I’m interested by the epistemological question here:
Let’s forget for a moment about all those Democrats (and, GP lefty troll commentors) who eagerly proclaimed that the Iraq war was lost, Gitmo was a gulag, Marines are murderers, and… oh yeah… gas rising to a whopping $3 in 2007. Talk about rooting for bad news! But let’s forget them, for a moment.
Notice the structure of what Obama is saying. He can’t quote an actual Republican leader (say in Congress) who has rooted for high gas prices to hurt Obama. No. So instead, he quotes a newspaper that claimed Republicans were “licking their chops”.
Again: He can’t quote a real instance of the claimed phenomenon. Instead, he quotes another-lefty-claiming the phenomenon.
Echo chamber, anyone?
(continued) Now that is an example of so-called “post-modern” epistemology. And metaphysics, come to think of it. Epistemology deals with the question, how do we know what we know? Metaphysics with the question, what’s really ‘there’ to know? In post-modern philosophy, there is no objective reality. There is only “the narrative”, the thing that opinion leaders assert to be real, and hopefully get the majority of people to say is real.
These days, left-wingers are all post-modernists as well, and here we see Obama at work. The fact of whether any Republican in Congress (or other major leader) “licked their chops” over high gas prices, is not only a meaningless question, but an utterly irrelevant one. All that matters is “the narrative”, invented and propagated by the left-wing echo chamber. Reality is not important; making sh*t up (inventing what left-wingers -want- to be true) and then propagating that narrative in and via the echo chamber, is all that matters and all that is to be treated as real.
Gas went from $3.39 to $3.45 to $3.55 over less than week in my area. Thanks Obama!
If you want a better analysis of the jobs numbers, check out Dick Morris’ column about how in January they magically changed how they’ve been calculating things like unemployment, car sales and housing sales. Looks like an election year cooking of the books, and the media will play right along!
http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/obamas-phony-recovery/
Interesting, Tim. Some say that Obama won’t get far with it: http://hotair.com/archives/2012/02/24/dem-pollster-warns-that-voters-will-scoff-at-claims-of-recovery/
Dick Morris’ column basically say’s Obama’s cooking the numbers won’t work in contrast with the real world. The Democrat pollster’s data backs Morris up on this issue.
There is an undercurrent here that needs to be explored. India bought a huge amount of gold, supposedly through the IMF. The IMF does not have a deposit of gold, so, it would have get the gold from the NY FED depository in NYC. Whether the gold has been sent to India or moved to the India vault at the NY FED is unknown. India and China are supposedly buying oil from Iran and paying in gold, instead of US dollars. Iran would hardly accept gold payments being held in NYC.
However, if the price of oil is shifting to a quasi gold standard, it would cause the US dollar to reflect its “true” value in relation to the cost of a barrel of oil
Thus, what we may be seeing at the pump in the way of price increases is in no small part a result of the lessening of the value of the US dollar.
I have a liking for buffalo meat hamburger. It has shot up in price at the grocery store by about 35% in the past year. Now, that is a lousy marker for inflation, but in some ways it is not. The “scarcer” goods usually are leading indicators of the devaluation trends. When the small producers have to keep a closer track of the profit margin, they are the very first to raise prices.
Obama has to fight the notion that his shutting down oil lands and denying the new pipeline have had any effect on oil prices. He also has to pretend that inflation is non-existent.
But the US has become a net exporter of fuel for the first time in many years. The Obama explanation for this is “dampened US demand.” That is the same thing as saying that supply has overcome demand in the US. Obviously, if the fuel companies would lower the price of oil, the demand would increase. But the fuel companies can find a ready market outside the US, so they have no incentive to tighten their profit margin.
In actuality, the US fuel producers are supplying the world demand and they can sell it readily while paying high prices for the raw oil. If the income to the fuel producers becomes backed by gold, the fuel producers will have greater “paper” income when the gold payments are expressed in weakened US dollars.
So, the issue becomes one of where and how the petrodollars are stored. With the Euro on the skids and the Russians clamping down on the Europeans in terms of natural gas and petroleum, it is becoming increasingly clearer that energy supply has taken the driver’s seat in the world economy.
Windmills and solar panels have not begun to offset nuclear and fossil fuel energy production. The bottom line in the energy game is how it is stored, not generated. You can not store wind or solar energy anywhere nearly as efficiently as a lump of coal, a stick of wood, a barrel of oil or some radioactive rock.
So, we live in this pretend world where clunky batteries supposedly just recharge themselves from an outlet that is connected to hope and change and nothing more. Pixie dust and unicorn farts and all of that.
This price at the pump web is a tangled mess of political deception. If the Republicans were in power, the Democrats would be screaming at the oil companies. Since the Democrats are in power, they seem pretty content with high unemployment, a starving free market, rising energy prices, huge and growing deficits, all of which are the fault of “Bush and the 1%.
Borrow, spend and tax the rich. That is the clear path to resolving our mess. Or not.
What baffles me is that here in Florida, liberals whine that Republicans want to drill within 125 miles of the coast. Nobody ever mentions that it’s already being done off of Cuba in the Florida Straights (a helluva lot less than 125 miles).
They also claim “some Republicans want to drill in the Everglades” without ever saying who those Republicans are. They tried to claim it was Rick Scott, but he never said that he wanted to.
This ought to be easy for the Republican candidate as it seems to me that he’s actually going to be running against straw men.