Dumb Politics

A depressing juxtaposition in today's papers: I started the morning with Paul Krugman's "Know-Nothing Politics" in the NYTimes. The short version is this: anyone who actually knows anything knows that offshore drilling won't have any effect on gas prices for years, and even when the effects kicked in, they would be very small. But Republicans have found an issue. According to one poll, 51% of Americans think that offshore drilling would help bring gas prices down within a year. And so we can expect to hear the drumbeat for drilling all the way to the election, even though it's brute force blather that wouldn't have much of an effect on the real problem. Krugman's conclusion: Republicans are no dumber than Democrats, but Republicans will be more than happy to peddle crude "solutions" that gain political points, whether the solutions are smart or not.

Then to the Washington Post and to Charles Krauthammer's piece "No Will to Drill." The subtitle is "Democrats resist logic -- and politics." Krauthammer claims to be a pragmatist. He agrees that we can't drill our way out of our energy problems, but we can't get out by any one way. Americans, he says, are two to one in favor of offshore drilling, "thus unlocking vast energy resources shut down for the past 27 years."

Hmmm... The best that can be said on Krauthammer's side is that the size and accessibility of those "vast resources" is a matter of dispute, and that the tradeoffs we need to make if we're going to drill aren't as simple as Krauthammer seems to assume. Of course we should attack the energy problem on multiple fronts. No Democrat I know of says anything different. But is this Krauthammers point? That we should go ahead and drill because it can't hurt and might help? Sounds good but it's not so simple. Drilling could hurt plenty, in plenty of ways, not least by taking resources away from better ideas. Krauthammer is right about one thing, however: the Democrats are going to take a political beating on this one.

So should we not drill? Not my point. It's not obvious that we should, but to come up with an answer that I could defend, I'd have to know a lot more than I do. I'm pretty sure I know this much, though: the majority of Americans who say we should drill don't know any more about it than I do.

Meanwhile, just how dumb was Obama's comment? Here's a link to a piece in Time that suggests it wasn't dumb at all. Using numbers that aren't at all wild-eyed, Michael Grunwald claims that Obama is actually right: we get more mileage out of inflating our tires and taking good care of our cars than we would out of drilling offshore. And when we add some other straightforward conservation measures, the energysavings -- "negawatts" and "negabarrels" add up quickly.

All the more reason to suspect that Krugman is right about something else: the politics of brute force bandwagon thinking has the wind at its back. Does Barack Obama's energy policy really amount to nothing more getting us to inflate our tires properly? The fact that it's even necessary to say "Of course not" is depressing. But will that remark, perfectly sensible in context and a lot truer than it seems, be milked for every drop of political fuel that can be gotten from it? Only the dumb money says no.