Mitt Romney recently had this to say about the documentary on Obama’s first term directed by Davis Guggenheim:
“I’ll give you some help, Mr. Guggenheim,” Romney said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “You can make a call to some of the moms that are having a hard time paying for gas as they get their kids to and from school and practice and music lessons. And you can also talk to the people who are having a hard time getting to and from work, given the price of gasoline.”
It is all gasoline all the time with these guys. Newt can’t shut up about gasoline and I recently saw a clip of Santorum holding up a piece of shale and claiming that the shale was chock full of “light sweet crude.” I thought Santorum was about to jam a straw into the shale and suck out the crude like it was a Capri Sun. Seriously, I haven’t seen a bunch of guys having this much fun with gasoline since Zoolander. But… really? Gasoline? that’s the ticket to another Republican in the White House? I don’t see it.
Granted, they are pretty thin on issues. President Obama has mostly taken “national defense” out of play for them, and in spite of the chicanery of congressional Republican, the economy is rebounding from the fiasco created by George Bush, so there are not a huge number of issues that they think can play “to the middle.”
Forget birtherism and contraception, those are for GOP primary audiences only. The GOP wannabes need a kitchen table issue and they all think gasoline is it. Dean Baker puts it like this:
…Republicans are betting that they can get away with their story nonetheless. The public is almost completely ignorant of the dynamics of world oil markets. It is widely believed that prices are determined domestically and that if upscale environmentalists did not get in the way, we could drill out enough oil so that gas prices would be cheap again.
Since the media consider it to be their job to report what candidates say and not access its accuracy, it is likely that the public will go the polls believing that we can again get cheap gas if we just destroyed the environment. The reality is that we have the ability to do the latter.
Will it work? I don’t know. But I think we all know that waiting for the media to do more than simply transcribe Romney’s outrageous bullshit is a mugs game. So that leaves team Obama as the gatekeepers and so far I like their parry. First he mocked Fox News for bringing it up in a press conference then he went on to sound like a President of the United States:
“There is no silver bullet.” he said. “There never has been. But while we don’t have a silver bullet, what we do have in this country are limitless sources of energy, and a boundless supply of ingenuity and imagination that we can put to work developing that energy.”
I guess, ultimately the GOP’s gasoline fever looks like it will accomplish something. When America goes to the polls, we’ll either be voting against the socialist egghead enviro-Nazis keeping us from cheep gas with all their hippie tree hugging, or for the guy who says that we are still country that can think its way out of problems.