Just Another Day On A Rig

My belief is that this McCain boomlet in the polls is largely due to his acting Presidency during the fighting in Georgia while Obama was on vacation. Perception is often reality, and when one guy looks the part and the other guy is chomping on Hawaiian cheeseburgers, there's an effect. Never mind that McCain completely overreacted and such hotheaded-ness is the last thing we need in a President.

But that's generally over now, and now McCain is back to the same old politics, yesterday jumping on an oil rig to make the point that... they can bear his weight? What?

Senator John McCain finally headed out to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday morning to sound his call for more offshore drilling, a refrain he has repeated almost daily in this summer of gas-pump sticker shock. Hurricane Dolly had forced Mr. McCain to cancel a trip to the rig planned in July.

“Americans across our country are hurting because of the cost of energy,” Mr. McCain planned to say on the rig,” after an hour and 15-minute helicopter flight from Kenner, La., a suburb of New Orleans. “Gas prices are through the roof. Energy costs have seeped into our grocery bills, making it more expensive to feed our families. And now, as people prepare for the winter, they are going to be hit with higher costs for home heating oil. It is time for America to get serious about energy independence, and that means we need to start drilling offshore at advanced oil rigs like this.”

It's weird that the 70-cent drop in oil prices due to falling demand hasn't been mentioned since conservatives started up the Mighty "drill now" Wurlitzer. The fact that there's a way to continue to reduce demand, lower emissions and cause less damage to the environment goes down the memory hole. Increased drilling adds to our dependence on oil, the opposite of what's needed.

This rig McCain was on, by the way, is partially owned by Exxon, but at this point, what isn't, right?

There's the long-version rebuttal, from the Obama campaign:

“For three decades, as our energy crisis grew, decision-making in Washington has been rigged against our national interests and the interests of American consumers. And for almost that long, Senator McCain has been part of the problem. For decades, he has stood with the big oil companies and voted against the development of the alternative energy we need. When a critical proposal came before the Senate late last year that would have provided tax incentives for the development of alternative energy by revoking $13 billion in giveaways to the oil companies, he was the only Senator who didn’t vote - and we came up one vote short. And now he’s standing with the oil companies in opposing a bipartisan compromise in Congress that would expand offshore drilling and, at the same time, make serious investments in alternative energy to break our dependence on foreign oil. When it comes to solving our energy problems, John McCain is just more of the same and America can’t afford it.”

And the short version, from surrogate Tom Vilsack:

"[McCain] continues to reject bipartisan compromise because it would roll back massive tax breaks for the oil companies," he said. "That is not putting the country first, it is putting the interest of oil companies first."

This feeds directly into the coming floor fight in Congress. Republicans simply won't repeal tax breaks for Big Oil, not even now, after years and years of record profits. They won't establish a renewable standard. Their "all of the above" plan just means open the coasts and send money to oil companies who won't drill but will put the leases into their reserves and raise their stock price. A smart campaign (I know, wishful thinking) will reveal that Republicans are in love with Big Oil and don't want to actually lower gas prices. MoveOn is already making this bet, spending half a million dollars to tie Elizabeth Dole and McCain to Big Oil in North Carolina.



Republicans are basically trying to hide on this issue by saying that the bill should move through the regular committee process. They don't want to make the hard vote against drilling that they would make if it includes repealing the tax breaks.

The problem, of course, is that if there's no deal by October 1, the coastal drilling ban, which needs annual approval by Congress, gets lifted. (Couldn't that make for some nifty ads by Democratic challengers, by the way, calling out longtime Reps. for voting to ban offshore drilling for 25 years?)