Dan

Calabrese

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August 7, 2008

Obama’s Priorities: Inflate Tires, Deflate the Economy

It’s usually during the last three months of a presidential campaign that the air goes out of the Democratic nominee’s tires. Barack Obama might want to check his pressure.

Democrats lose, barring help from a Watergate-caliber scandal or chaos-inducing third-party candidate, because you can’t win when you refuse to solve the problems people want solved, and you can’t hide your refusal forever under the illuminating exposure of a national campaign.

In the Great Tire Pressure Debate of 2008, Obama commits the classic Democratic fumble of offering any excuse, no matter how absurd, for leaving real problems unsolved in service to the party’s left-wing base. In the course of doing so, he reveals that his and their agenda is that of austerity, not economic growth.

America could not keep its own energy resources under lock and key forever without feeling the effects. How inconvenient for Obama that, just when the political headwinds finally appeared to be at his party’s back, the real-life effects of liberal ideas rose up and smacked voters in the face in the form of $4-a-gallon gasoline.

There is no single answer to soaring gas prices, but there is no way to seriously dispute that one answer is to drill our own oil resources in the Gulf of Mexico, the Outer Continental Shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and various spots in the western United States.

Obama’s answer? Keep the oil in the ground and put more air in your tires. If we did that, Obama said during a recent campaign appearance, we would save more than “all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling.” (This is the eloquent orator? “All the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling”?)

The McCain campaign has lampooned the comment, and rightly so, by sending out tire gauges and labeling them as Obama’s energy policy. Obama, who takes criticism like my seven-year-old takes vegetables, huffs indignantly that “every expert” agrees with him.

Let’s give Obama his tiny due. Yes, properly inflated tires improve gas mileage, and that conserves oil. So does walking or riding a bike – measures Obama would surely cheer. But you can’t fuel a growing economy with tire pressure, let alone by hitting the bike trail. Growing economies require plants to fire up, trucks to deliver stuff and people to drive to work. They require air travel, rush-hour traffic tie-ups and helicopters to tell you the Lodge Freeway is stop-and-go again.

Growing economies require oil. Ask China and India, each of whose oil consumption has jumped more than 300 percent since 1980, because their economies are growing. Ask the entire world (Obama’s fellow citizens!), whose oil consumption has jumped 38 percent during that same period (compared to just 21 percent for the apparently conservation-minded United States).

If the U.S. economy is going to grow enough to balance its budget, start paying down its debt, lift people out of poverty and fund all the spending Obama says he wants to implement as president, it will need to engage in a lot more energy-consuming activities than it does currently. We cannot do this by using less oil. We have to use more. A lot more.

So Democrats are simply not being serious when they talk about re-ordering the entire economy to rely solely on new fuel sources – most of which are either not yet in existence or a long ways away from being able to provide for America’s energy needs on any kind of mass scale. The same party that argues against ANWR drilling, claiming you can’t prove there’s enough there to make a difference and you can’t get it quickly enough, argues for reliance on alternative fuels that can’t be proven to work at all, and may not be useable on a large scale for 100 years for all we know.

It would be one thing if a presidential candidate told the public, “You do your part to conserve energy by keeping your tires inflated, and I’ll do my part by finding more of it wherever I can.” That would be a reasonable proposition to fuel economic growth.

But by arguing for conservation only, and continuing to resist drilling on a massive scale, Obama gives away that he has no interest in seeing serious economic growth any time soon, because right now, serious growth means serious oil consumption. And that’s the opposite of what Obama’s political base wants, which is why he is left to lecture Americans about tire pressure.

If he were to say what he really means, he would say this: “You’d better use less, because I’m not going to let you have any more.” And if he said that, he would lose.

Late summer and early fall are usually the time when the voters figure out for themselves what the Democrats really mean. Which is why November is usually the time when Democrats lose.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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