As we think about the troubling energy prices and their solutions, we should remember that ANWR is a hard, mostly empty place, as these pictures by Jonah Goldberg illustrate. It is dark in ANWR continuously for 56 days each year. In the summer, this area the size of South Carolina is still empty but for muskeg, mosquitoes, critters and danger. In the winter, it is so cold and desolate that its sole village, Kaktovik, is home to only 260 people. Hard to get much more empty than that. Indeed, if you were ab initio to pick an ideal out-of-the-way location in all the world to drill for oil, you might just choose the remote and otherwise useless northern reach of Alaska that is now called ANWR.

But it is not just ANWR that is a hard and empty place. That description has been imputed by some to the GOP presidential nominee and his position on drilling in ANWR (“a don’t-drill zombie”). Recent record oil prices would appear to give the GOP and John McCain a tremendous windfall profit — a great political wedge in an election said to heavily favor Democrats. After all, 80% or more of Republicans in Congress favor doing what it takes to increase production in this country (the world’s third largest oil producer), while 90% or so of Democrats in Congress oppose such measures. Alas, John McCain seems to have a tin ear on the politics of the issue in the era of $4 gas, as well as incoherence when it comes to the internal logic of his position. Fred Barnes:

John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He’s been loud and relentless on the subject — and wise. “It’s a national security issue,” he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that “do not like us very much,” he noted. That was McCain’s understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort.

So you’d think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn’t. There’s an intellectual and political hole in McCain’s position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates…

McCain favors increased domestic oil production, but not drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the barren area with large (and recoverable) oil reserves. President Bush and most Republicans want to open ANWR for drilling and have for years. But McCain is adamant. His aides insist it’s a waste of time trying to persuade him to change his mind. He wouldn’t want oil companies to drill in ANWR, McCain says, “any more than I would want them to drill in the Grand Canyon or the Everglades.”

As for exploration and drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida, McCain says that’s fine. Only there’s a catch: States must decide. “I would like to give them incentives and increased revenues from oil that was recovered off the shores of Florida and California, et cetera, but being a federalist, I am not going to force them to do that,” he told Glenn Beck last month. A federalist on what he regards as a grave national security threat? That’s an odd stance. It seems more like a dodge…

To us, Drill Here, Drill Now, with all its implications, would appear to be a very useful wedge issue for Republicans. Every American is suffering the consequences of oil prices when they fill up their tank or get on an airplane, so the issue has universal reach (these prices are killing truck and SUV owners and dealers). Moreover, it clearly and completely would separate McCain from Obama on an important domestic issue. He’s never going to win the brie and chablis crowd anyhow, so why should he care what they think (unless he personally holds the same views)? It’s much more important for him to win Hillary Clinton’s demographic in rural America and elsewhere, and attacking gas prices in this direct, action-oriented way (as opposed to the fatuous and lawyerly approach of suing OPEC) would seem one good approach to doing so. In addition, a clear position from candidate McCain in favor of swift development of all of America’s abundant energy resources (a new Apollo program of sorts) might itself exert some downward pressure on oil price expectations.

Perhaps most importantly, there is an overarching electoral theme to drilling for our own oil and solving our own problems — namely, presenting America as the “Can Do” country once more, just as it was in the past. Lately it seems that America has lost its way, and has forgotten that “Can Do” attitude that characterized so much of our last three hundred years and made the country great. Relying on others to solve America’s problems is a loser’s attitude — it is certainly not the America that put a man on the moon, conquered polio, won WWII, universalized the internet, and spread freedom around the globe.

Senator McCain’s campaign, and the whole GOP, are in need of an uplifting theme to present to Americans to counter the vapid, but apparently appealing, “change we can believe in.” On the Republican side, there is an empty place where such an uplifting theme should be, and that is not a formula for success. It remains to be seen whether the GOP and the McCain campaign figure out, before it is too late in this election season, how to tap into the “Can Do” attitude that the majority of Americans practice in their own lives every single day. So far, this is a wasted opportunity — indeed, a self-inflicted wound — for no good reason whatsoever. (HT: Doug Martin) Final point: drilling is hugely popular across the political spectrum:

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.