Mitt Romney has recently taken every opportunity to blame the President for the high price of gasoline; for a man with so many vehicles that he is building an car elevator in one of his four houses to store them more efficiently I am sure this is a source of great stress on his personal finances. Since there is no sign that gas prices will be plummeting any time soon we can expect this accusation to continue throughout the campaign.
If he should win the election, the day after his inauguration he will begin telling us about how the President really has no control over gasoline prices, so don’t go looking to him for relief. On that occasion he will be correct. The price of gasoline is dependent on the price of oil and oil is a global commodity, moreover a commodity for which there is an exploding demand not accompanied by an exploding supply and over which no national leader has any measurable control.
But just for fun let’s buy into Romney’s fantasy that the President has an Executive Magic Wand on his desk in the Oval Office which he can wave and with the petroleum powers vested in him by John D. Rockefeller and the House of Saud miraculously lower pump prices to the point where Ms. Romney can satiate her Cadillacs without cutting into the family grocery budget.
In order to work this wizardry Mr. Obama will need methods which do not require Congressional approval, since nothing benefiting the country can get past the Republicans in the House so long as his mailing address continues to be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In addition, there must be no need for international cooperation since that cuts against Romney’s argument that the President can do this all on his own. That pretty much winnows down the options to actions strictly within the purview of the executive branch.
So what have we got? Well, Obama is the Commander in Chief, which means the armed forces are his to command, chiefly. So here’s what he does: he lines up the Army and a bazillion of its tanker trucks on the Canadian border, from Washington to Maine, and in the dead of night they quietly invade our good friends to the north and stealthily syphon the gas tank of every car in Canada (isn’t it nice that most of the population lives close to the border) and bring it all back for us. It is most unfortunate that there aren’t more Canadians, but to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the neighbors you have.
What else? How about using the Air Force to drop millions and millions of leaflets over China, India and Southeast Asia painting the worst possible picture of automobile ownership – car crashes, traffic congestion, pollution, sticker shock, endless annoying TV commercials proving conclusively that every single car and truck on the market is the best one you can buy in at least one category (“More cup holders than a Lexus!”, “The largest door handles in its class three years in a row!”) in hopes of discouraging all those emerging members of their particular middle class from wanting to squander some of their newfound disposable income on the personal transportation units we ourselves can’t live without, and why should we – we’re Americans, damn it, and we’re entitled to all the cars we want, and to cheap gas, too.
Or perhaps the Prez could offer the Saudi royal family the remaining bits of Beverly Hills and Manhattan they don’t already own at no charge in exchange for an exclusive discount on their best crude; he can appropriate the land from its current owners on national security grounds and pay them from the GSA party budget, which I understand is quite large.
So if you’re willing to be creative it appears that there actually are things our Chief Executive can do to spare us the pain of paying half as much for petrol as everybody in Europe has been paying for years.
Even I, a mere country lawyer with a mildly demented imagination, have been able to come up with three specific solutions offering the potential for real and immediate reduction in prices. Incidentally that is three more than candidate Romney has thus far articulated.
OK, Mitt, I’ve thrown down the gauntlet. Your turn.
