When Hillary Clinton first embraced John McCain’s idea for a temporary gas-tax holiday, I assumed she’d probably stumbled upon it by accident. Maybe, I thought, she was feeling a little desperate, and decided a little conservative pseudo-populism might be worth a point or two in Indiana. It never occurred to me Clinton would use the awful proposal as the basis for a week-long campaign, days before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.
And it really never occurred to me she’d use the bogus issue to triangulate against congressional Democrats.
After several days of back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over whether a summer-long elimination of the gas tax would help or hurt, Clinton took a hard line, asking her colleagues in Congress to take sides.
“I believe it would be important to get every member of Congress on record,” Clinton told supporters at a rally in southern Indiana. “Do they stand with the hard-pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills at the gas station or do they once again stand with the oil companies?
“I want to know where people stand and I want them to tell us, are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies?” she added.
Wait, with us or against us? Isn’t that Bush’s line?
Making matters slightly worse, the Clinton campaign acknowledged yesterday that every policy expert of every ideological stripe has described the McCain-Clinton idea as nonsense, but they don’t care.
“There are times that a president will take a position that a broad support of quote-unquote experts agree with,” spokesperson Howard Wolfson said. “And there are times they will take a position that quote-unquote experts do not agree with.”
Now policy experts aren’t to be taken seriously? What on earth has gotten into the Clinton campaign this week?
In the with-us-or-against-us formulation, it’s particularly odd that Clinton insists opponents of her gas-tax idea “stand with the oil companies.” By all indications, she has it backwards.
Economists … say the oil companies may end up the biggest beneficiaries, while the aid to families wouldn’t be enough to buy a $35 backpack.
The trouble with the plan, they say, is that oil prices are rising because of low supplies, and companies will continue to charge the average $3.60 a gallon and just pocket the money that would have gone to federal taxes.
“That’s $10 billion, and it’s going into the pockets of oil refiners,” said Leonard Burman of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “The last time I checked, they didn’t need it.”
Supplies are “being cleared at the current price,” said Donald Parsons, an economics professor at George Washington University in Washington. “If you take away the tax, you’ll have the same number of consumers willing to buy the gas at the same total price.”
Eugene Robinson tried to cut through the nonsense, as well.
Cutting the price at the pump, even by 18 cents, would help. But economists agree that suspending the gas tax wouldn’t have a prayer of achieving that goal.
What would happen? Well, we’re heading into the summer months, when consumption of gasoline always peaks — and when refineries are making just about as much gasoline as they can. If the tax were to be suspended, gas would cost less and people would want to buy more of it. Demand would rise, supply wouldn’t — and thus the price would ultimately go up. There’s no way on God’s earth that consumers would end up saving anywhere near 18 cents a gallon.
On a related note, Brad Plumer raises an interesting point: if Clinton really believes what she’s saying here, it raises doubts about her willingness to make the necessary calls to combat global warming.
As for the political implications, Jonathan Chait, after conceding that “betting on the intelligence of the American public is a bad move,” argues that Obama’s principled, reality-based position is a political winner. I’m not so sure. What we’re likely to see is a split — high-information, well-informed voters who see the Clinton-McCain proposal as crass pandering, and low-information voters who never hear about the evidence and falsely believe a gas-tax holiday might put a few extra bucks in their pocket.
Clinton seems to hope there are just enough people in the latter group who’ll buy into the nonsense and give her a political boost.
It’s cynical politics at its most disappointing. Worse, since low-information voters vastly outnumber high-information voters, this demagoguery might even work.