Elect Hillary For Low Gas Prices

'Tis the season for political promises. I guess. And this latest one from Hillary is a doozy:

When the world hears her commitment at her inauguration about ending American dependence on foreign fuel, Clinton says, oil-pumping countries will lower prices to stifle America's incentive to develop alternative energy.

"I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil," Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. "They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede."

Clinton argued that former President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s actually started moving in the right direction toward energy independence, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, "dismantled" that work.

So all it would take to lower prices is for president Bush to announce plans to develop alternative energy sources? If so, why wouldn't he do so at the first opportunity? Oh yes, because his rich Texas oil buddies and fat cats must not want him to. This latest from Hillary feeds perfectly into the Democratic party anti-oil company narrative. Except for one small problem: Bush has already made alternative energy a national priority, and so far it hasn't made any difference at all.

She has one part right. Jimmy Carter did take a step in the right but it was not around alternative energy sources, it was his deregulation of oil and gas prices, which lowered the price throughout the eighties. And Reagan did not abandon, but accelerated that process. Carter did push alternative energies, but the fact that we are still talking about alternative energy and actually using oil should give us an idea of how long this kind of talk has been going on.

So on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being crass, insincere and overtly political, and 10 being a genuine realistic policy proposal that has a chance of working, I'd give this a 2. At this point, If I was running the Clinton campaign, I'd be wondering if there was any way I could advance the campaign without Hillary talking. She is her own worst enemy.