McCain Could Drill for Votes

John McCain has a golden opportunity to win over many Republicans and independents who are not inclined to support him right now. How? Announce that he has changed his position on drilling in ANWR and offshore:

For years now, John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He's been loud and relentless on the subject--and wise. "It's a national security issue," he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that "do not like us very much," he noted. That was McCain's understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort.

So you'd think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn't. There's an intellectual and political hole in McCain's position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates.

Republicans have seized on public anger over $4 per gallon gasoline and are calling for domestic oil production in federal lands and offshore areas now closed to exploration and drilling. Since polls show the public agrees with them, Republicans believe "drilling"--the one-word capsulation of the issue--is their strongest political talking point in 2008. Indeed, it may be their only good domestic issue.

But they desperately need a champion to carry their message, someone whom the national media cannot ignore. And that should be McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. Except for one thing: He doesn't go along with their approach in important ways. He sounds, sometimes anyway, like a liberal Democrat or a lobbyist for the environmental movement.

McCain favors
increased domestic oil production, but not drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the barren area with large (and recoverable) oil reserves. President Bush and most Republicans want to open ANWR for drilling and have for years. But McCain is adamant. His aides insist it's a waste of time trying to persuade him to change his mind. He wouldn't want oil companies to drill in ANWR, McCain says, "any more than I would want them to drill in the Grand Canyon or the Everglades."

As for exploration and drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida, McCain says that's fine. Only there's a catch: States must decide. "I would like to give them incentives and increased revenues from oil that was recovered off the shores of Florida and California, et cetera, but being a federalist, I am not going to force them to do that," he told Glenn Beck last month.

A federalist on what he regards as a grave national security threat? That's an odd stance. It seems more like a dodge--a very un-McCain-like tactic--than a logical position. Nor does he take into account the new technology that allows drilling for oil and gas in deep waters far offshore with little risk of spillage or pollution of beaches.

At this point I'm not inclined to vote for McCain. I certainly won't vote for Obama, and if anything, will just write my own name in as a protest vote. However, if McCain were to go to ANWR and hold a press conference on the frozen tundra announcing support for drilling there and other U.S. locations as a national security issue, I'd give him another look and might actually vote for the guy. It would show me that he's serious about the national security ramifications of energy independence, and that he's will to go against his buddies on the Dem side and do something that's not politically correct.

Of course, it'll never happen.