America Needs Pump Pain

If you are still undecided about which presidential candidate to vote for, a helpful decision-making moment is at hand.

Oil prices and gasoline pump prices are now falling almost as rapidly as they were rising just weeks ago. With the per-barrel oil price recently more than $140 and projected by some analysts to top $200, the sudden descent to the low $120s is enough to make the sourest of us hopeful that help may be on the way.

Be prepared, then, to jump to the presidential candidate who tells you that any seeming help can only be temporary and that taxes should be levied to keep gasoline prices near $4 a gallon. That candidate will be the rarest of men - an honest one.

Of course, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is likely to volunteer for such an act of political suicide.

Folks are truly hurting from the high prices, and the broader economic turbulence is rocking the automotive and airline industries, shipping, tourism, agriculture. Really, just about everything.

It would be unnatural for politicians in such a time to adopt a take-your-medicine agenda.

McCain is thus pounding the lectern and demanding, Cheney-like, "Drill, drill, drill!" - a dead-end policy that moons for the long gone days of wildcatting.

Better, Obama would accept some additional off-shore drilling but only as part of a package that emphasized the development alternative energy sources. But not even Obama is likely to start touting the virtues of pump pain and thumping to keep the prices high now that they've turned (relatively) soft.

(Obama's expedient palliative - creaming 10 percent off the nation's strategic oil reserve - is a matching frivolity for the McCain's pitch to forego federal gasoline taxes.)

We've been through this cycle before.

Gasoline prices jump, with supplies cut by storms, politics, crimped refining capacity. We drive a little less for a while, eye autos with more appealing mileage, maybe even buy a few. Then supplies rebound, prices fall and it is giddy-to-go time again.

The whelp of the last upswing in the boom-and-bust cycle was the absurd Hummer. Trying to sell a used one these days is like trying to sell cholera. GM is, by some reports, dickering to unload the line on a potential buyer in India. It'll throw in shares on the Brooklyn Bridge.

We need $4 gasoline.

Only its ongoing shock will save us from Hummer relapse. Drill like crazy in Alaska and the continental shelf and we still won't make enough of a dent in the international market to lower prices significantly in the long run.

We are off-loading our treasure to the big oil producing states, which to a disturbing extent are led by dangerous, near-dictatorial thugs. We are monstrously overloading the biosphere with killer pollutants and we are hedging our maneuverability in international affairs. In thoughtless tandem, we are chintzing on support for new energy technologies, which promise to become a major new industry for the nations pioneering them.

But if either candidate were so rash as to say so? We would punish him mercilessly in November.