In his speech at the Republican National Convention, former Senator Fred Thompson said that one question people will never have to ask of John McCain is, “Who is this man?”
In truth, the comment was intended to say more about Barack Obama than McCain. It goes to the heart of many people’s reservations about Obama — namely that after two years of campaigning, Americans have at best a vague sense of who this man is. As Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, Obama remains a mystery, and it’s difficult to say what we know about how he will govern.
That is particularly the case on energy — among the most compelling issues in this long campaign. If the polls and the conventional wisdom are to be believed, Obama will sweep to victory in two weeks along with sizable majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress. Anyone trying to get a read on what his energy policy would be will have a hard time reaching real conclusions. The more one studies his positions and his campaign performance, the more likely one is to ask Fred Thompson’s question: Who is this man?
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Take ethanol. Obama appears to be trying to scrub the public record of his past support for federal corn-ethanol subsidies and mandates. In August, the Obama campaign
purged several sections on corn ethanol from his online energy plan. Now it may be that Obama’s staunch support for corn ethanol during the Iowa caucuses — the primary-season victory that created his campaign’s momentum — is now regretted and abandoned. Or it may be that this summer’s big increases in food prices — boosted in part by ethanol mandates — caused him to downplay his support for Big Corn, but that he has every intention of fulfilling his campaign promises to Iowa’s farmers. We simply don’t know — because the Obama campaign won’t tell us.
How about nuclear power? Obama has issued qualified support for nuclear energy, the expansion of which more and more Americans recognize as key to our energy and environmental security. Now, Democratic party orthodoxy has held firmly to a no-nukes policy since Three Mile Island. Yet for all of Obama’s supposed buck-the-base boosterism, he fails to support nuclear power in the one area that could really make a difference: waste storage. He opposes the proposed nuclear waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, and offers no alternative plan for dealing with the spent fuel piling up at the nation’s 104 commercial nuclear reactors. Is that a wink and a nod to the environmental lobby that nuclear power won’t go anywhere on his watch? Inquiring minds want to know.
The Obama campaign is particularly muddled when it comes to coal, the much-maligned fossil fuel responsible for half of the electricity Americans use every day. Obama, who hails from a coal-producing state, has voiced support for research into “clean coal” technologies designed to capture and sequester the carbon dioxide released when the fuel is burned. Environmentalist dogma holds that there is
no such thing as clean coal, so Obama’s position is heralded as yet another reach-across-the-aisle departure from Democratic orthodoxy. But it’s not clear how wedded the Obama ticket is to the campaign’s boilerplate promises. Vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden may have revealed the campaign’s true thinking in an unscripted rope-line gaffe last month. “
We’re not supporting clean coal,” said Biden. According to the Delaware senator, an Obama administration’s policy would be “no coal plants here in America.” Does anybody know where they really stand?
The energy issue that captured the most attention in a summer of sky-high gas prices was the tussle over offshore drilling. Obama first opposed relaxing the federal offshore-drilling ban. Then, as it became clear that huge majorities of voters favored lifting the ban, he evinced tepid support for very limited drilling. “We do need to expand domestic production,” he said during the third presidential debate. “That means, for example, telling the oil companies the 68 million acres that they currently have leased, that they're not drilling: use them or lose them.”
The use-it-or-lose-it argument folds under inspection, however. First, that’s the way the system already works. If a company doesn’t produce on a lease (for which it pays rent to the government), then the rights revert back to the Feds. Second, having a lease is no guarantee that an area has oil or gas underneath. If a company holds a lease but isn’t drilling, it’s because it has determined that there isn’t enough extractable oil or gas to make it worthwhile, or it is being held up by permitting issues or litigation, environmental and otherwise. The fact that some leases don’t produce is no argument against offering leases in areas with significantly more oil and gas.
