According to Michael Hirsh in Newsweek, John McCain is trying to take an area where Barack Obama is considered more visionary – energy policy – and recast himself as the real innovator with Obama more of an empty futuristic suit. Hirsh thinks McCain just might be succeeding. If so, it certainly is not on the merits of his proposals.
I have been watching the McCain energy plan evolve . . . well, no, “evolve” is not the right word. I have been watching it unfold . . . hmmm, “unfold” does not seem quite fitting either. Okay, how about this? – I have been watching McCain’s energy policy splatter into the public forum for the past couple of weeks now and I now understand exactly what it wrong with it.
I cannot argue with Hirsh’s contention that its many concrete specifics contrast well with Obama’s tendency to remain hazy when speaking about his own strategies. McCain’s proposals include overturning a ban on offshore drilling and (at President Bush’s suggestion) re-opening debate on drilling in Alaska’s ANWR nature reserve, building forty-five new nuclear power plants (and storing the waste offshore rather than in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain), the ever-popular summertime “gas tax holiday,” a $5,000 tax credit for people buying “zero-emissions” automobiles.
Oh, yeah! McCain thinks we should have some sort of market-based long-term movement toward alternative fuels, the centerpiece of which is his $300 million prize to anybody who can invent a significantly more efficient battery.
In comparison, he laughs at Obama’s plan to invest $150 billion into developing potential alternatives, calling it science fiction and labeling his opponent “Doctor No,” the evil scientist villain from the first James Bond movie.
Even if you buy his premise that Obama has a strategy without specifics, then McCain has come up with specifics without a defining strategy. McCain claims his goal is to “achieve strategic independence by 2025.” That is unquantifiable, un-measurable pap.
Granted, Obama’s goal of “reduce the energy intensity of our economy fifty percent by 2030” may sound equally fuzzy but the term actually refers to a national economy’s energy efficiency and can be measured as units of energy required per unit of GDP produced. Obama’s other goal to “reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce oil consumption overall by at least thirty-five percent or ten million barrels by 2030” should be clear to anyone. This is the difference between planning and pandering.
McCain’s energy proposals do have some central ideas connecting them, one of which is pandering to what the public wants. Listen to this blurb from his latest commercial.
American technology protected the world. We went to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. John McCain will call America to our next national purpose – Energy Security. A comprehensive bipartisan plan to lower prices at the pump, reduce dependence on foreign oil through domestic drilling, and champion energy alternatives for better choices and lower costs.
In the first sentence, McCain challenges Americans that energy independence will be hard. In the next sentence, he promises what everyone wants most today, right now – lower gas prices. His plan will not lead to significantly reduced prices in the long term. Neither will Obama’s. The difference is that Obama admits it and offers tax breaks to the middle-class and poor to help those hardest hit and who will continue to be hardest hit in the near future. McCain pretends permanent, significant price drops can happen and offers gimmicky quick fixes.
The fundamental flaw with McCain’s energy plan is that it relies too much on existing technologies. It sounds reasonable to say “we have to emphasize short-term measures to address the problem now.” But this is the ultimate Catch-22. If we buy this line – again! – and no relief comes, then we are told we have to focus on emergency, short-term measures all the more. If relief is achieved, then everyone smiles happily and asks why we need to spend billions for alternative fuels when gas is so cheap today. We have done it before and we will do it again if allowed to be lead down this path.
What is required from our next President is leadership in a new and dramatically different direction as regards energy. Only government, with its ability to spend, regulate, and manipulate markets on a large scale can force our economy and its industries into the necessary paradigm shift. Conservatives will warn that government solutions are inefficient and there is truth in this but the free market can have its inefficiencies as well.
McCain argues that Obama’s spending does not guarantee results while his battery prize reward results. This is true enough but it is also a non sequitur. Rewarding results is not the same thing as guaranteeing results. And the market’s free hand of self-interest can be capricious.
Should a new battery inventor emerge, even assuming they are American, it is possible they will take McCain $300 million prize with gratitude and urge him to use it to go save the nation. It is equally possible they will tell him to take his prize and tuck it up his asshole, right next to his enlarged prostrate, preferring to patent their device and become the next Bill Gates of energy, the new Exxon-Mobil.
McCain’s allusion to Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon is interesting. When JFK made that pledge back in 1961, do you think he could have answered a single question about the specifics of how it could be done? A recent PBS documentary on FDR noted that when campaigning in 1932 based on a “New Deal,” the President was notoriously short on specifics of what it entailed. This was because on the night he was elected, he still did not have any.
Experience is a fine thing but real leadership when changes in direction are required take vision and the courage to take risks. Sometimes you cannot predict how things will turn out but must rely on the ability of others, with proper guidance, to achieve it. Obama has these qualities. McCain does not.
If there is any clear, overarching commonality to his energy plan, it is the Republican specialty of fear. McCain cannot speak in terms of energy needs, energy production, or energy development; he boils everything down to energy security. Even his commitment to fighting global warming is framed not as environmentalism but national security.
John McCain is afraid. He is afraid the Arabs and OPEC have already beaten us on energy dependence to them and our only option to flex our military muscles often and garishly to keep them at bay. He is afraid that Americans do not have the ingenuity, do not have the perseverance, do not have the willingness to sacrifice in order to gain true independence from foreign oil. He is afraid of the big oil companies, afraid that they will refuse to cooperate with plans to move toward alternative fuels anytime soon. He knows they will be content to literally squeeze oil from rocks like coal and shale before they abandon their source of wealth.
This is why his energy plan concentrates on existing technologies and emphasizes the short-term. Every aspect of McCain’s energy plan, like every aspect of every Republican proposal, is driven not by the better aspirations of what we can become but out of fear of what we need to defend ourselves against. Better to give up civil liberties and keep guzzling oil than dare to drink of the “Kool-Aid” Obama is peddling as far as John McCain is concerned.
Some maintain we fought a war in Iraq over oil. If so, what were the benefits? We are viewed with more hostility than ever by an angry Middle East and $4.00+ per gallon gasoline is not going away in our lifetimes. We continue to import more oil than we can ever produce and if all this is true then the brave men and women sacrificing themselves in Iraq today are not dying for nothing; they are dying for less than nothing.
John McCain was once a brave soldier. He is now a frightened old man. Given the opportunity to serve as the reformer of his Party, he instead chose to embrace its mistakes. There is only going to be a short-term for John McCain but it is a long haul for our children and grandchildren and they deserve better from the next President than him and his collection of frightened fossil fools can offer.
They deserve a President with the energy to envision the future and the energy to lead us to it.
