How Bush Won’t Get His Groove Back
Incredibly bad advice from Dick Morris today:
The growth of the gas-price issue presents Bush with an incredible opportunity to change the subject of our political debate from a problem he can’t solve before the 2006 elections – Iraq – to one he can begin to solve – gas prices.
How does Morris think Bush can ‘solve’ this issue?
The key for the president is to show how independent he is of big oil by leading the movement toward alternative fuels in a big way. He should declare the equivalent of the bomb-building Manhattan Project and embark on a crash course to switch us from gasoline to alcohol- and hydrogen-based fuels.
By moving away from gasoline, he can rebut the presumption that he is in the pocket of the oil companies and become the leader of a national crusade against gasoline.
And he can bring it back to Iraq and the War on Terror – pointing out that his drive for alternative vehicle fuels is the key to disempowering the radical Islamists. Without our oil money, they are nothing. So, for Bush, the gas price issue is a twofer.
Morris is correct in his diagnosis – that gas prices give a lot of power to Islamofascists – but he’s oh-so-wrong in his prescription. The markets aren’t stupid (at least not for long) – there are a number of reasons prices are going up, and those reasons won’t go away because Bush makes some noises about alternative fuels as a campaign tactic. People will see through that for the short-term priority it is – and once November comes and goes, it will be business as usual.
There are good reasons to go to alternative fuels – and the oil companies, believe it or not, know it. They are putting money into new fuels and new techniques to extract existing fuels. They have the cash – and they have the motive. Government won’t solve the fuel crisis – mean ol’ Big Oil will, because they know, like the tobacco companies, that the current trends don’t favor them, and they have no intention of going out of business…
“Incredibly bad advice from Dick Morris” is almost always redundant, isn’t it?
Even if Bush does just as he says, how does that help him this November? Unless somebody’s got the magic formula for the car that runs on air sitting around in his notebook, any “Manhattan Project” isn’t going to pay dividends for years. It might be worth undertaking, but thinking that voters will vote based on things like “He’s demonstrating his independence from Big Oil” is the kind of logic only dippy consultants would come up with.
The things which would work are not politically feasible, and the things which are politically feasible will not work.
There is a confluence of intertwined events — the falling dollar, higher interest rates, oil and commodity prices — which are not susceptible to a short term fix. I think what will happen is what always happens: the market will set prices for these assets and politicians will follow behind pretending they are in control.
Morris is correct in his diagnosis – that gas prices give a lot of power to Islamofascists – but he’s oh-so-wrong in his prescription. The markets aren’t stupid (at least not for long) – there are a number of reasons prices are going up, and those reasons won’t go away because Bush makes some noises about alternative fuels as a campaign tactic. People will see through that for the short-term priority it is – and once November comes and goes, it will be business as usual.
I think you’re misunderstanding what Morris was getting at. If Bush were to do this, Morris is implying that energy prices would fall because the “New” Manhattan project would be successful, and we won’t use all that oil, hence gas prices would no longer be an issue, since our gasoline usage would plummet. Whether or not any of that makes sense from an economic perspective is, of course, up for debate. Quite a few very educated people think that E85 ethanol-based fuelwould rarely, if ever, fall below equivalencies of today’s gas prices, when adjusted for energy-per-gallon levels. The same issues apply with hydrogen.
Quite a few people seem to think that there’s a magic bullet out there. Some fuel that will move my car 30 miles for about $1.50. But there really isn’t. And while Morris’ idea would certainly move to remove power from the Islamofascists, it most certainly wouldn’t bring anything more than a short-term price reprieve (driven by market euphoria) at the pump.