Politics and Prices

Frankly, I am disappointed with the presidential candidates.

On March 31, 2008, I visited the campaign websites for Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama.

I sent each of the candidates the following question: “If elected President, what would you do to lower gasoline prices?” I thought that rising gasoline prices was pretty important and something that most Americans were concerned about.

The responses were disappointing:

- Clinton - “Thank you for your message. I have received thousands of emails from people all over the country. Your comments are very important to me and I am excited that so many people are joining our conversation about how to change the direction of the country. Unfortunately, due to the high volume of comments, I am unable to respond to each email individually.
- Obama – “Thank you for contacting Obama for America. The volume of messages we're receiving has gone up since Barack's victory in Iowa. While we cannot respond individually to over a thousand messages per day, the level of interest and thoughtfulness of the comments reflected in these communications are very gratifying. Your thoughts on our campaign and America's future are greatly appreciated.”
- McCain - Nothing

Perhaps the McCain campaign needs to invest in an auto responder to produce the automated acknowledgements produced by the Clinton and Obama websites. While gratifying to be thanked for my comment, the responses did not address my question.

Undaunted in my pursuit for an answer to my question, I tried to search the websites for an answer. Unfortunately, I was only able to find a search engine on the McCain site. A search of his site for “gasoline” produced no hits. I guess the NCAA basketball tournament brackets trumps gasoline prices.

I continued my search and Googled the candidate and gasoline prices. The search produced the following results:

- Clinton – A March 14th visit to a gasoline station in Pittsburgh promised a plan to battle high energy costs, but focused on clean energy , an send to tax breaks for oil companies, and a one-year moratorium on additions to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
- McCain – In a interview shown on YouTube, Senator McCain said he didn’t have an immediate answer to rising gasoline prices.
- Obama – In an April 1st statement, Senator Obama blamed oil companies. "They are not necessarily putting that money into refinery capacity, which could potentially relieve some of the bottlenecks in our gasoline supply. And so that is something we have to go after. I think we can go after the windfall profits of some of these companies.” Obama said the country needed to do more to increase production and incorporate ethanol that used sugarcane not just corn. He also said that the internal combustible engine had seen its last days.

The moratorium probably makes the most sense in terms of a possible short-term solution. Greater reliance on ethanol is not unless you want to court the favors of that tax subsidized fuel.

While we support and have advocated for several years a Manhattan Project response to oil use, this effort will not produce an immediate solution. The structure and organization of such an effort must be considered as well and will be discussed in a future blog.

Overall, I see little in the candidates’ comments to suggest that they do not understand industry fundamentals or dynamics. We may not like McCain’s response, but it is the most honest of the three candidates. Clinton’s comment on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will provide some relief. Obama’s comments on building new refineries, replacing the internal combustion engine, using ethanol and repealing oil industry tax breaks are just plain absurd.