All Tied Up?

Every conceivable metaphor – the prevailing winds, the political tide, the conventional wisdom – has been thrown at the presidential race for months now, explaining why this November would be the death knell of the GOP and how you should already begin practicing saying “President Obama.” Still, for some reason, the most recent polls from Rasmussen seem to show the race drifting into a statistical tie. What happened? Dick Morris has a guess.

Part of the slippage is Obama’s fault and part is McCain’s gain.

Obama has carried flip-flopping to new heights. In the space of a month and a half, this candidate — who we don’t really yet know very well — reversed or sharply modified his positions on at least eight key issues:

Morris goes on to list a number of issues. For the record, I don’t agree with the description of a “flip flop” on all of them. In some cases, such as the campaign finance question, it looks more like unavoidable pragmatism. On others, though, such as gun control, he would be the envy of any bass in the bottom of a boat.

His second point seems far more plausible and it comes in the area of energy.

Meanwhile, McCain and the Republicans have finally found an issue — oil drilling — exposing how the Democrats oppose drilling virtually anywhere that there might be recoverable oil. Not in Alaska. Not offshore. Not in shale deposits in the West. The Democratic claim that we “cannot drill our way out of the crisis in gas prices” begs the question of whether, had we drilled five years ago, we would be a lot less dependent on foreign market fluctuations.

The truth is that the Democrats put the need to mitigate climate change ahead of the imperative of holding down gasoline prices at the pump. If there was ever a fault line between elitist and populist approaches to a problem, this is it. In fact, liberals basically don’t see much wrong with $5 gas. Many have been urging a tax to achieve precisely this level, just like Europe has done for decades.

This isn’t so much about Obama as an individual candidate, I believe, as it is a rapidly growing, general sense of dismay at the Democratic Party’s refusal to come to the table on the energy question. Morris feels that this is one issue where Obama can not afford to step back. It would simply be a bridge too far for his most active base of supporters. But with no short term solutions presenting themselves, will it turn out to be a Catch 22? Like Morris, I’m not sure where apostate Obama supporters would flee. Bob Barr? Nader? In any event, I agree that the numbers seem to be slipping as the summer wears on, and it’s hard to imagine that the pains at the pump aren’t feeding into this somehow.