Barack Obama, meet Herbert Hoover… There is a lot more resemblance between the über-old-white-dead president and the hip, urbane Democratic candidate from the cover of GQ than meets the eye.
     Both of them have the very important trait of being unable to stare an unpleasant fact in the face.
     While Hoover was president, years of margin buying on the stock exchange began to catch up with investors. In those days you could buy a dollar’s worth of some stocks for as little as 10 cents down. The 90 cents you didn’t pay was the margin. For reasons that economists are still trying to figure out, but which include the fall of the far-off Austrian schilling and the effects of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, the people selling the stocks needed their 90 cents. Now. All at once.
      People who thought they had, say, a portfolio worth $1,000 (which was a lot of money in 1929), discovered that instead, they owed $900. People were forced to liquidate their savings, sell their businesses, their houses and their personal possessions to pay off these debts. So many businesses closed and downsized that a full third of the labor force lost their jobs.

     In those days there was no welfare safety net... There was the “dole,” which could be the state or the city or a church group passing out bread or coal to the needy. Al Capone opened a string of soup kitchens. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Al Capone was doing more to materially help poor people than Herbert Hoover.
     Hoover starved the people to death over a principle. Principles matter, but hungry bellies matter more. Hoover believed that a welfare state would corrupt the character of the country, devalue work, and encourage idleness. Ironically, he was a hero in Europe, where he spearheaded Belgian relief after the Great War. There was nothing wrong with eroding Belgian character, but he would not do it to Americans.

     So instead of offering relief, Hoover offered encouragement. “Prosperity is just around the corner,” Hoover said. With all the grass growing in the streets you couldn’t even see the corner. “The fundamental economic basis of this country is sound,” Hoover averred. The only sound was of children crying with hunger.
     Hoover, the chief executive of the United States, pronounced himself unable, as a matter of principle, to address the crisis: “Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement. Economic wounds must be healed by the action of the cells of the economic body - the producers and consumers themselves.”
     And it was that quote which reminded me of something Barack Obama said a few days ago.

     Let me preface this by saying that Obama was trying to be factual… In Springfield, Missouri, Obama said, "Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups…. You could actually save just as much."
     Wow. There is an estimated 1.6 trillion gallons of oil to be had in the Outer Continental Shelf. That number, written out, is 1,600,000,000,000 gallons. That is the oil supply the Republicans want to drill. Is that how much we are wasting by riding on soft tires in a year? Or six years? Or 50 years?
     According to the U.S. Department of Energy, if cold tire pressure is adjusted to specification on all cars, we would effect a 3.3 percent savings of fuel. Our total gasoline consumption in a year is 142.3 billion gallons, according to the DOE; so Obama is wrong about the amount saved, but not about that fact that gasoline would be conserved.

     But here’s the problem... Checking your tire pressure is not going to roll back gasoline prices from $4 a gallon back to $2.50 or even $3.50. Being told that Prosperity is just around the corner (like wind and solar power) is hopeful and encouraging. Being given something we can do to save a buck is a nice gesture.
     Unfortunately, encouragement, gestures, bromides, helpful hints and principled stands that fly in the face of the overwhelming will of the people don’t get the job done. In order to get out of the Depression, America had to take a big gamble and let Franklin D. Roosevelt essentially rebuild the structure of American society from the ground up.
     The Republicans are asking for something much less risky. They are simply asking to drill holes in the ground. What principle is it that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid hold to be more sacred than the well being of working Americans?
     Herbert Hoover did a century’s worth of damage to the Republican Party by his insistence on the principle of “rugged individualism.” Are the Democrats willing to sacrifice the White House and destroy their party for the benefit of the Greenland ice cap and the beach residents of Santa Monica?

Yesterday Senator Harry “We’ve Lost the War” Reid… raised the hopes of just about everyone when he offered the Senate Republicans four amendments to the Oil Speculation bill the Democrats are pushing in Congress.
    To briefly review, the Democrats believe its evil oil futures buyers, like California public employee union pension funds, that are responsible for the rise in the price of oil (and $4 a gallon gasoline) rather than supply and demand, like the Republicans believe. The Republicans and about ¾ of the adult population of the United States, wants us to explore and drill on the outer continental shelf and desolate places like ANWR. The Democrats oppose this.
   And when it became certain yesterday morning that the GOP amendments to the Speculation Bill would be about allowing new exploration and drilling, Reid hastily took the offer of Amendments off the table. The Republicans in their turn blocked a media protection bill and a bill offering tax breaks for the development of alternative energy and a shield for middle class taxpayers against the hated alternative minimum tax.
     The Republicans are going to make an issue of oil drilling whether or not Bush decides to call Congress into an August session to deal with the problem. “The only thing standing now between the American people and these vast oil resources is the United States Congress,'' Bush said yesterday, striking a theme for the campaign.
     Meanwhile, in the House, the membership voted to adjourn for the summer on Friday. All the republicans and a pack of blue-dog Democrats kept the vote close, giving the adjournment a one-vote majority. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is finding something less than unanimity among her party when it comes to drilling, but she seems to be holding the line against any party insurgents. The Democrats have too much to lose this fall to show a disintegrating front on energy.

      We must all be prepared to continue to shell out north of $4 a gallon…  for gasoline. That’s the cost of saving the plant…as well as a doubled electric bill and a trebled fuel-oil bill.
     You know, if you were to scratch the surface of a congressional Democrat, like Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, you would find that they really believe outrageously expensive gasoline is a good thing. Until last month the Democrats were ready to present us with a 500-page global warming bill that would have raised the tax on gasoline anyway as a measure more or less forcing fuel conservation. Why? To reduce the rate of emission of greenhouse gasses, which many believe, are dangerously warming the climate –or which may not be dangerously warming the climate, depending on whose research you believe.
     Actually, the research on global warming is complex and contradictory. Both proponents and skeptics believe their data is irreproachable, definitive and settled. Both side mock the intelligence of the other, leaving in doubt such trivial matters as: Is global warming happening at all? How bad will the warming be if it is happening? Is it man made or a solar/cosmic ray phenomena? What would we have to sacrifice to turn it around? Can we turn it around? Can we turn it around if China and India don’t want to help?

     It is highly politically incorrect for me to say this... but these questions still require an answer. For many of us unscientific types, being presented with a mass of speculative facts and figures about what is going to happen to the climate by the end of the century is not of much cheer when we have the concrete problem of paying our bills by the end of the month.
     Most of us haven’t got the leisure to worry about the fate of the polar bear, the thickness of the Greenland ice cap, or a prospective 12 or 16 or 30” rise in the level of the sea. We are worried about keeping our jobs, paying our bills and maintaining a decent standard of living. If the Republicans want to adopt that rhetoric in the upcoming energy wars, they might just do well with it.

In a recent puff piece about her in The Politico, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi --fan of longitude (“‘I have always loved longitude,’ Nancy Pelosi says before breaking into laughter. ‘I love latitude; it’s in the stars. But longitude, it’s about time…’”) and future chair of the Democratic Convention in Denver—declares it simply, “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.”
     To Pelosi, “saving the planet,” means fighting any Republican attempts to lift the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration. “I will not have this debate trivialized by their excuse for their failed policy,” Pelosi says. So there. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/12122.html.
     So let us redefine our terms. By “save” Nancy Pelosi means stopping offshore oil exploration and drilling and by “planet” she means the ritzy beaches of Santa Barbara and vicinity in California which were soiled in an oil spill 35 years ago that helped to launch the careers of politicians like …Nancy Pelosi.

     I’m all for Pelosi sticking to her guns… and sticking it to the Republicans on this issue –and for all the usual ulterior motives. Frankly the GOP hasn’t any other strong issues to save its legislative bacon this fall besides $4 a gallon gasoline. Pelosi and the Democrats are handing this issue to the Republicans on a platter.
     A very strong wave of anti-Bush feeling is about to drastically cut down Republican membership in the House and Senate, making those bodies, perhaps, veto-proof for the Democrats.
     Then along comes the oil price crisis, which the public believes (correctly) can be relieved by a commitment to drill and explore for more oil, the current untapped leases to which the Democrats constantly point having no –-for want of a better word—oil.
     There is oil on our continental shelves. There is oil in the bleak wastes… Sorry. I mean “pristine beauty” of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And if Nancy Pelosi has anything to say about it, that oil is going to stay there.
     Instead of the massive and immediate relief in oil price futures that the announcement of drilling and exploration would bring, Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid of the Senate offer us –revenge against the speculators.

     You know the speculators, don’t you? They are retired public employees, pension fund holders and former teachers who have invested in funds that trade futures in oil. The U.S. output of oil is dwindling, and the remaining oil supply offers a slim surplus of just 2 million barrels a day worldwide. This (and demand from China and India) makes oil scarcer than it used to be, thus raising the price. The futures buyers pay the price –thus guaranteeing the future supply of oil.
     The public is not exactly thirsting for the blood of former school nurses who are getting by in their Golden Years on earnings from their investments. But Senator Reid refuses to entertain Republican amendments to the anti-speculation bill that would allow drilling. And Nancy Pelosi would see to it such amendments aren’t even heard in the House.
     This makes the Democratic Congress the Bad Guys in this controversy, in which the public supports drilling (74 percent of likely voters support drilling, 18 Percent oppose, 8 percent not sure – Zogby International 26 June, 2008 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/257903)--but the Democrats are willing to adjourn the Congress for the Summer at the end of this week, rather than to allow drilling.   
     DigitalJournal.com put it aptly: “A vast majority of likely voters, across the political spectrum are in support of offshore drilling, which pits the Democratic leadership against the will of the people.”

     What President Bush should do, if he is smart, is to call Congress back into session in August and let them try –and again fail—to pass energy legislation. Then he and Senator McCain can label this a “do-nothing Congress,” taking a page from Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook. Obama will have to take a stand on the issue –and of course he will not desert his party—then the Republicans will have an issue that might save the White House for them and perhaps cut the losses in Congress.