But if McCain is smart – or can rent a brain – he would jump on that formulation and remind people day after day what the failed policies of the past really are.
Let me count the ways.
Jonah Goldberg refers to the failed energy policies that have resulted in $4 per gallon gas.
Nearly 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter’s windfall-profits tax kicked in, making domestic oil exploration more difficult and expensive. In 1981, Congress passed a moratorium on offshore drilling that has stayed in place ever since. In 1990, the first President Bush signed an executive order reinforcing the ban on coastal oil exploration. And, until this week, the current President Bush supported the ban.
And yet, no cheers for Bush when he abandoned his failed policy of the last eight years. Instead, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid sniffed that these were more of the same “old ideas.” Odd.
And when John McCain similarly reversed himself, the Democrats whistled the same tune again.
“John McCain’s plan to simply drill our way out of our energy crisis is the same misguided approach backed by President Bush that has failed our families for too long and only serves to benefit the big oil companies,” declared the Obama campaign.
Now, it’s fair to say that more drilling is the approach President Bush wanted. And it’s even defensible for Obama to call it misguided. But the salient fact is that Bush didn’t get what he wanted because he was constrained by the real failed policies of the past.
Indeed, we constantly hear we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices, but how does anybody know when we haven’t even tried?
Despite enormous improvements in extraction technology, the amount of oil produced domestically in America went down in the last eight years. It went down in the 1990s. It went down in the 1980s. In fact, it’s been trending down since the 1970s, back when Barack Obama’s “new” ideas seemed fresh coming from Jimmy Carter. Today, we produce about as much domestic oil as we did in the late 1940s, even though we keep finding, but not utilizing, more proven reserves.
That hardly sounds like a country that’s been dedicated to “drilling our way” to anything. The issue isn’t just oil. Gas prices largely hinge on refining capacity. But, as John McCain observed this week, “There’s so much regulation of the industry that the last American refinery was built when Jerry Ford was president.”
A lot has changed since Barack Obama was 13. No one knew what an iPod, e-mail address, web browser, CD, DVD, or Post-It Note was. Fax machines were cutting edge, the space shuttle was a pipe dream, and cloning was science fiction. Global cooling, not warming, was the fashionable doomsday scenario.
And yet, we act as if technology has remained frozen since the days when it made sense to “dial” a phone number.
So much for the supposedly failed policies of the past.
And what about the failed policies of the past regarding Islamofascist terrorism? Obama, believe it or not points to the arrest and trial of the “Blind Sheik” and his acolytes who were the first to bomb the World Trade Center. This, he claims, is the way we should deal with terrorists. It sure worked on 9/11 didn’t’ it? This is a position that is a softball that should be knocked out of the park.
Obama has a plan for everything, and everything he proposes has been tried and found wanting either in the United States or in other countries. And everything that he proposes is a top-down one-size-fits-all solution crafted in Washington. This is not just a failed policy of the past, it’s a failed policy of the far past; a policy that not only tells you what you can’t do but one that tells you what you must do.
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY in Obama’s world.
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