There is a good chance we will see lower oil before the elections. This article paints a picture of presidents having little say over prices, but I think this administration is too close to oil to not have way of bringing about temporary changes at a crucial point.
July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil at $70 a barrel was enough to prompt President George W. Bush in January to pledge to make the U.S. self-reliant for its energy needs. Today, with the cost of a barrel approaching $80, he's mostly keeping silent...
...The president's party may be vulnerable to a voter backlash over high energy prices in November's midterm elections, according to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll conducted last month. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they have cut other spending because of rising energy costs, and 61 percent said Bush is responsible for high gasoline prices.
The political perils of the issue were demonstrated by the experiences of another U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, who sought to enact a national energy policy during a period of rising energy costs.
In April 1977, Carter appeared on national television in a cardigan seated by a roaring fire to deliver what he called ``an unpleasant talk'' in which he advocated a program of ``strict conservation'' and ``the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power,'' an effort he described as ``the moral equivalent of war.''
While Carter eventually got a version of his program passed by Congress, energy prices -- driven by events such as the 1979 Iranian revolution -- kept rising. Carter's call for conservation was widely mocked by his opponents, who used to it to paint him as a weak leader, and he was defeated for re- election in 1980.
Norm Ornstein, a fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, says that ``the ghost of Carter'' serves as a lesson. ``It's very clear when you try and rally the public behind some grand energy scheme, it's not going to work,'' he says.
``You can look at it two ways,'' David Hamilton, a Washington official of Sierra Club -- an environmental group that's often critical of Bush -- says of the administration's efforts. ``They either didn't mean it in the first place or they really have been ineffective in making anything meaningful happen.''
July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil at $70 a barrel was enough to prompt President George W. Bush in January to pledge to make the U.S. self-reliant for its energy needs. Today, with the cost of a barrel approaching $80, he's mostly keeping silent...
...The president's party may be vulnerable to a voter backlash over high energy prices in November's midterm elections, according to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll conducted last month. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they have cut other spending because of rising energy costs, and 61 percent said Bush is responsible for high gasoline prices.
The political perils of the issue were demonstrated by the experiences of another U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, who sought to enact a national energy policy during a period of rising energy costs.
In April 1977, Carter appeared on national television in a cardigan seated by a roaring fire to deliver what he called ``an unpleasant talk'' in which he advocated a program of ``strict conservation'' and ``the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power,'' an effort he described as ``the moral equivalent of war.''
While Carter eventually got a version of his program passed by Congress, energy prices -- driven by events such as the 1979 Iranian revolution -- kept rising. Carter's call for conservation was widely mocked by his opponents, who used to it to paint him as a weak leader, and he was defeated for re- election in 1980.
Norm Ornstein, a fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, says that ``the ghost of Carter'' serves as a lesson. ``It's very clear when you try and rally the public behind some grand energy scheme, it's not going to work,'' he says.
``You can look at it two ways,'' David Hamilton, a Washington official of Sierra Club -- an environmental group that's often critical of Bush -- says of the administration's efforts. ``They either didn't mean it in the first place or they really have been ineffective in making anything meaningful happen.''
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 31, 2006 at 11:34 AM.
