OBAMAN TRENDINESS – AT 10:50 A.M. ET:  It's become clear that the soaring price of fuel is cutting seriously into the American family.  But you'd never know it by listening to some Democratic spokesmen on TV.  Problem?  What problem?  These people love to talk about "long-term" solutions.  They remind me of the kind of person who, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, wanted immediately to make plans for the UN.  After all, why bother with what's happening now?

But high prices are happening now, and can wreck the plans of a generation if they go much higher.  These prices come on top of a huge recession, which, although technically over, really isn't in many American cities and towns.

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that the Obama energy policies are a fantasy cooked up by ideologists who seem to care little about the immediate impact of their ideas: 

Are high gas prices a good thing?

That is not as dumb a question as it sounds. Examine a few revealing past remarks from President Obama and the cabinet officials who are now in charge of the nation's energy use and oil leases on federal lands. Then decide whether the current soaring gas prices are supposed to be good or bad.

In 2008, Sen. Ken Salazar (D., Colo.) - now secretary of the interior, in charge of the leasing of federal oil lands - refused to vote for any new offshore drilling...

...From 2007 to 2008, Steven Chu, now secretary of energy, weighed in frequently on global warming and the desirable price of traditional energy. At one point Chu asserted, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe." Chu also lamented, "We have lots of fossil fuel; that's really both good and bad news. We won't run out of energy, but there's enough carbon in the ground to really cook us."

In other words, $10 a gallon for gas would be desirable, while an enormous amount of recoverable American oil, gas, coal, tar sands, and oil shale should be left untapped.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama himself had strange ideas about the prospect of expensive prices for fossil-fuel-generated energy: "Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."...

...As for consumers' plight in paying skyrocketing gas prices, the president, now and in the past, has sounded ambivalent. He recently told a questioner, "If you're complaining about the price of gas and you're only getting eight miles a gallon, you know, you might want to think about a trade-in." Few large passenger vehicles today get only eight miles a gallon, and many squeezed Americans in recessionary times cannot so breezily think of "a trade-in."

But why weren't Americans outraged by comments like that, and the policies that followed?  It's not because they were in good shape.  They weren't.  It's because the media blitz on behalf of Barack Obama, the dream of the sixties generation, overwhelmed everything else, and continues to do so.  They used to call Reagan the "Teflon president," but Obama makes Reagan look like Mr. Vulnerability. 

So much of this administration's talk about energy sounds similar to a bull session in the faculty lounge, or what we would expect from lifelong bureaucrats and public functionaries who have never experienced long commutes or struggles in the harsher, profit-driven private workplace.

Absolutely correct.

Since reelection looms, the administration now insists that high energy prices are no longer good, but suddenly bad. And the evil oil companies are mostly to blame!

And, with the help of the press, Obama may turn that into a winning argument.

April 30, 2011