Soccer Dad

Shed my skin

Jack Kelly on Sen. McCain and a successful campaign issue (via instapundit).

The winning theme is obvious. We're paying roughly twice as much for gas as we should have to pay because the Democrats in Congress won't let us develop our energy resources. Sen. Barack Obama opposes drilling for oil, mining for coal, building nuclear power plants. If he's elected president, gas prices will rise to $5 a gallon or higher.

On the positive side there's this:

Mr. McCain has said (for him) some remarkably sensible things recently about energy. He's for drilling off our coasts. He wants to build more nuclear power plants. He's one of the few members of Congress to have opposed from the get-go the biofuels fraud, which, according to a recent World Bank study, has forced up global food prices 75 percent while only negligibly reducing demand for oil.

Opinion polls show a large majority of Americans favor drilling off our coasts, and comfortable majorities favor drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve and building nuclear plants. A majority (even in Iowa!) now opposes ethanol mandates. Energy policy could be a game changer, as potent an issue for Republicans in 2008 as the war in Iraq was for Democrats in 2006.

But Mr. McCain has been Hamlet when he needs to be Henry V. He is discarding a strong hand through mixed messages and equivocation. He supports drilling on the outer continental shelf, but opposes it in ANWR. He backs a "cap and trade" program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that would devastate our economy. Nuance is important in policy-making, but can be disastrous in political campaigning. If the trumpet be uncertain ...

(Larry Kudlow thinks that McCain has abandoned his support for "cap and trade.")
Kelly concludes:

Mr. McCain needs to decide, pronto, which is more important to him: Winning the election or receiving an occasional kind word from liberal pundits who will vote against him.

My only quibble with Kelly's diagnosis is that distancing himself from the environmental movement may be hard for McCain. He has been known to be very strong on environmentalism. One of his early political patrons was Mo Udall.

In order to take the positions that Kelly recommends, Sen. McCain will essentially have to say, "environmentalism as it exists is a luxury we can no longer afford." It won't simply be promoting a number of measures that are politically popular, but rejecting a big part of his political pedigree. Not every candidate can shed his political skin that easily. (via instapundit)