Barack Obama is now in full campaign mode. He tried doing the governing thing for two years. It didn’t work out, and now he needs scapegoats for his failed policies.
The price of gasoline is currently more than $4 per gallon as oil has skyrocketed to more than $112 per barrel.
Barack Obama knows that flowing rhetoric about “hope,” “change,” and “yes we can” will fall hollow in 2012 if people look to him to bring down the price of oil and he concedes “no, I can’t.”
Since platitudes are long since worn out and solutions elude him, Obama’s path to reelection involves creating another conservative bogeyman to demonize. Oil “speculators” are the flavor of the week.
Attacking speculators is as boring as it is misguided. Any moment now everybody from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the Koch brothers to British Petroleum will be blamed. Mr. Obama might as well blame Buddy Ebsen. After all, Jed Clampett and the rest of the Beverly Hillbillies made their money in oil. This may explain why Mr. Obama brought Los Angeles traffic to a standstill last week as thousands of cars idled away petrodollars. Somebody get Barnaby Jones to investigate.
Those wanting to blame speculators should buy a thesaurus and then look in the mirror. Somewhere in a nursing home there is a 90-year-old grandmother who has a mutual fund containing a few shares of stock in some oil company she bought back when the Charleston was the latest craze. Have this woman arrested now! She is a speculator.
Speculators play both sides of all markets, and phony politicians only complain when the market refuses to cooperate with the public. When speculators drive the stock market higher, there is happiness. When the speculators drive it down, there are calls for investigations. Commodities provide the reverse reaction. When oil skyrocketed to $147 a barrel in 2007, people screamed bloody murder. When it crashed down to $33 a barrel, nobody blamed speculators.
(Silver and gold hit all-time highs this week, but nobody is screaming at speculators for that. Mr. Obama cares about oil because it affects him.)
So to all of those crybabies and the president desperate to appease them, the laws of supply and demand cannot be repealed. They cannot be declared unconstitutional. Barack Obama cannot part the seas and make the markets cater to his reelection efforts.
Yet there is one thing Mr. Obama can do to help lower oil prices.
He can stop being himself.
He needs to wake up tomorrow and admit that his anti-oil policies are a major reason prices are so high.
During his 2008 campaign, he pointed out that under his plan oil prices would “necessarily” have to rise.
This is not complex. In the same way the war against tobacco companies led to higher cigarette prices, the Jihad against the oil industry is causing oil prices to rise.
In Mr. Obama’s mind, getting everybody off of oil is noble. He wants a green economy that operates on alternative energy sources. He wants Americans to give up their cars and rely on high-speed rail. His entire energy and environmental agenda is meant to end dependence on oil.
Supporters find this laudable while critics find it impractical. Yet what is truly ludicrous is for a man to deliberately try to destroy the oil industry while then wondering why this would affect prices.
There are so many ways to bring down the price of oil, from domestic drilling to turning Iran into a 50,000-hole golf course and seizing their oil.
Mr. Obama has telegraphed that his policies are meant to get us away from oil. Therefore, any sensible gambler would play oil to the upside. The gamblers did not create the trend. They jumped on the bandwagon. Anybody criticizing this investment strategy should deliberately try to defy trends and see how they enjoy losing money. Politicians are often irrational, but markets in the long run are as rational as can be.
Mr. Obama is right to want to make America less dependent on foreign oil. He is wrong to try and enact policies that have an adverse effect on ordinary Americans needing cheap oil today. He is even more wrong to blame those engaging in sensible actions when his own senseless actions led to the problem in the first place.
Mr. Obama should do one of two things. He could go on television and explain why higher oil prices are good for America. He could scold Americans and shame them into giving up oil and driving. It would be political suicide, but a courageous, integrity-based stand.
He could also get out of the way. He could stop hijacking the permit process while pretending to support drilling. He could allow domestic drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and other techniques involving oil shale.
If he chooses to remain a leftist anti-oil ideologue, then he needs to have the honor and decency to justify his position.
This will not happen. Mr. Obama knows that his fantasyland approach to energy has failed, and hopes that he can fool just enough people to slink into a second term.
Speculators everywhere should buy and sell legally whenever and wherever they please. Risk-takers built this nation. One obtuse and desperate politician should not be allowed to subvert centuries of global tradition and commerce.
Mr. Obama is the problem. The speculators are the solution.
So as people bet on 2012 oil prices, stock prices, and presidential prospects, Mr. Obama will continue to stew over what he cannot regulate, manipulate, or obfuscate.
It is called freedom. It existed long before leftist anti-capitalists, and will exist long after many more socialist models are discredited and reduced to the ash heap of history.
Based on historical trends, that is a very safe bet to play to the upside whether Mr. Obama likes it or not.
Eric Golub is a Brooklyn-born stockbrokerage and oil professional living in the People’s Republic of Los Angeles. His blog is the TYGRRRR EXPRESS and his three books are “Ideological Bigotry,” “Ideological Violence,” and “Ideological Idiocy.” His interests include politics, football, the stock market, and Republican Jewish brunettes.