About a month ago, John McCain hoped to counter-program against Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin with a photo-op that would have captured at least some attention — he’s hop on a helicopter and give a speech from an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Louisiana coast. It didn’t work out — a barge collision had caused a spill of an estimated 9,000 barrels of fuel into the Mississippi River. The McCain gang didn’t want to visit the rig if the reporters on hand were going to notice the smell of diesel wafting through the French Quarter.
Today, McCain got his second shot at the photo-op he wanted.
Senator John McCain finally headed out to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday morning to sound his call for more offshore drilling, a refrain he has repeated almost daily in this summer of gas-pump sticker shock. Hurricane Dolly had forced Mr. McCain to cancel a trip to the rig planned in July.
“Americans across our country are hurting because of the cost of energy,” Mr. McCain planned to say on the rig,” after an hour and 15-minute helicopter flight from Kenner, La., a suburb of New Orleans. “Gas prices are through the roof. Energy costs have seeped into our grocery bills, making it more expensive to feed our families. And now
, as people prepare for the winter, they are going to be hit with higher costs for home heating oil. It is time for America to get serious about energy independence, and that means we need to start drilling offshore at advanced oil rigs like this.”
I don’t think “independence” means what McCain thinks it means. If we’re hoping to achieve energy independence, the goal is to be less dependent on oil. Drilling for more oil does the opposite.
McCain added that Obama “has said [expanded coastal drilling] will not ‘solve our problem’ and that ‘it’s not real.’ He’s wrong, and the American people know it.”
Does this make any sense at all? I can’t speak to what the electorate knows or doesn’t, but expanded coastal drilling really won’t solve our problem. Indeed
, McCain argued the same point up until fairly recently, before he abandoned his position in opposition to expanded coastal drilling in order to pander to desperate consumers.
According to his prepared remarks, McCain also argued that a new U.S. energy policy will “require aggressive development of alternative energies like wind, solar, tidal and bio-fuels.”
McCain does realize he’s been voting against these alternative energies for quite a while, doesn’t he?
The Obama campaign’s response was a little long, and I realize that facts don’t really matter to most voters, but it had the benefit of accuracy.
“For three decades, as our energy crisis grew, decision-making in Washington has been rigged against our national interests and the interests of American consumers. And for almost that long
, Senator McCain has been part of the problem. For decades, he has stood with the big oil companies and voted against the development of the alternative energy we need. When a critical proposal came before the Senate late last year that would have provided tax incentives for the development of alternative energy by revoking $13 billion in giveaways to the oil companies
, he was the only Senator who didn’t vote – and we came up one vote short. And now he’s standing with the oil companies in opposing a bipartisan compromise in Congress that would expand offshore drilling and, at the same time, make serious investments in alternative energy to break our dependence on foreign oil. When it comes to solving our energy problems , John McCain is just more of the same and America can’t afford it.”
As long as we’re on the subject, Yglesias reminds us this morning that one of the McCain campaign’s latest ads insists that McCain promises voters he’ll “battle Big Oil.” Yglesias asks, “What’s he going to battle big oil about?”
Good question. At this point, McCain is reading from the oil industry’s playbook, giving the industry everything it wants, including tax cuts and expanded coastal drilling rights. Where, exactly, does the “battle” come in?