We Have to Get Used to the High Prices — Obama Offers Nothing!

Gasoline prices were pushing toward $4 a gallon in the spring of 2011, and American drivers were doing the math at the pump: every ten-cent increase drains roughly $40 million more from consumers each day, according to the government's own reports. Restaurant meals and movie nights were being skipped because the money went into the tank.

The Obama administration's answer, in substance, was that Americans would have to get used to it. The factors driving prices — surging demand from the growing economies of China and India, instability in oil-producing regions — were largely outside any president's control. The official message was supply and demand, not policy failure: long-term transition to clean energy, higher fuel-economy standards, and less dependence on foreign oil.

Critics saw it differently. House Republicans pointed to the administration's record of restricting domestic production — withdrawing Utah oil and gas leases, closing most offshore areas to future drilling, and a de facto drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that was projected to cut production by 10% by 2012. Their argument: with unemployment near 9%, the country needed more American energy, not less.

The deeper political irony was not lost on anyone. Liberals had spent years arguing that America needed to wean itself off oil — and that rising prices were, in some sense, the market doing what cap-and-trade was designed to do. Steven Chu, Obama's Energy Secretary, had even mused in 2008 that gas prices ought to be boosted "to the levels in Europe." Now the White House was in the awkward position of not being able to celebrate the very price signals it had once endorsed.

So the drivers of 2011 were left with the worst of both worlds: the high prices the administration's energy philosophy implied, and no political payoff — just the bill at the pump.