Jonah Goldberg
is a nationally syndicated columnist
You may have noticed that denouncing the "failed policies of the past" has become the official catechism of the Democratic Party.
By that logic, if everything President Bush has done is wrong, then a reversal of his position would be right.
Yet we didn't hear applause from Democrats recently when Bush "reversed" his "long-standing position" (in the words of the New York Times) on offshore drilling.
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 last week, the current President Bush supported the ban.
Still: No cheers for Bush when he abandoned his "failed policy of the last eight years." Instead, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) 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," the Obama campaign declared.
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.
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 the United States 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 oil domestically as we did in the late 1940s, even though we keep finding (but not utilizing) more proven reserves.
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 McCain observed: "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, 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.
When they want to seem mainstream, anti-carbon crusaders insist we must achieve "energy independence" to "end our addiction to Middle Eastern oil."
This makes it sound like their real motive is common sense or national security: "We're not anti-oil, we just don't want to fund our enemies." But if energy independence were their real goal, not only would oil, coal and nuclear be on the table, but you'd hear more lamentations about our "addiction" to Canadian oil - a bigger source than Saudi Arabia.
Instead, we are treated to an endless stream of intellectual jibber-jabber and nonsensical argy-bargy. We need to be "energy independent" - but we can't use the energy sources we have. We need to "switch to ethanol fast" - but we can't import cheaper ethanol from Brazil. We must increase gas taxes to "wean ourselves from fossil fuels" - but when gas prices go up for any other reason, it's a crisis, even a crime. We're told we'll get nowhere drilling our way to independence or lower prices, as if windmills will do the job (stop laughing).
We shouldn't fight "wars for oil," but the self-imposed embargo on our own oil makes us even more dependent on the foreign oil we're allegedly going to war over. And, of course, we're told to reject the failed policies of the past, when the policies that have failed are the real old ones merely being sold as new.