Thursday, July 10, 2008
Editorial: The Gilmore campaign pumps hot air
If the U.S. began pumping all its domestic oil today, it would be gone in a few short years. Then what?
From the RoundTable blog
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Senatorial hopeful Jim "Drillmore" Gilmore dropped by area gas stations Tuesday to pump up the price chatter. He dubbed it his "Virginia Working Families" tour. He's working families all right.
Gilmore is back to his old trick: Find a pocketbook issue that pinches families and convince them that he has an easy, painless solution.
Last time, when he was running for governor, Gilmore fooled voters into thinking he could make their car tax go away. Some, who write smaller annual personal property checks, still foolishly think he helped them. He did nothing of the sort. He simply took what was a local tax and made it a state tax. Folks still pay it, just out of a different pocket.
And when a billion dollars a year is stripped from the state treasury to prop up local treasuries, guess what happens to the state budget? That $950 million might help right about now to bail out the state's transportation problems. Of course, it's not as simple as that. To frame an argument in such a way is deceptive -- but no more deceptive than Gilmore's latest campaign trick.
He's a smart politician. He knows that $4 a gallon gasoline hurts every last one of us. He also knows that it's a matter of supply and demand. So instead of understanding the complexities of dwindling oil supplies and quickly rising global demand, then working on ways to reduce U.S. demand, candidate Drillmore frames it this way: Pump more oil. Open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, set up rigs off the nation's coasts; heck, the oil companies can even drill in his own back yard.
Even if Drillmore hoodwinks voters into sending him to the Senate, and even if he finds enough like-minded members of Congress and a president to agree with his scheme, and even if oil companies set right to work exploring offshore and draining ANWR, prices at the pump are not going to budge.
But for argument's sake, let's just agree they might drop a quarter or two. People fill up again on cheaper gas and go back to their gas-hogging SUVs. In a few years, when all the U.S. oil fields are sucked as dry as he left the state's coffers -- and they will be -- what then?
Jim Drillmore's successor will have to figure that out. Sound familiar?
