There is a pretty fundamental political mistake being made when it comes to McCain’s energy plan and it sounds a lot like this:

You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there… Wherever he was going to drill.

BARACK OBAMA
August 5th, 2008

What Obama says there is absolutely true. And the broader point he made a few sentences later was equally true: “They’re making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant. They think it’s funny that they’re making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework. Because this is serious business.”

But there’s also something very important that’s being missed here. You can see it being missed even more widely in this frontpage Daily Kos posting where the author mocks McCain for being for both wind power and off-shore drilling.

Here’s the problem: There is absolutely nothing incompatible about being for both off-shore drilling and wind power. And nuclear power. And biofuels. And solar power. And proper tire pressure.

The defining quality of the energy plan McCain is selling is, quite simple, “I will try absolutely anything if it might reduce energy prices.”

There is a real and growing sense of desperation in America right now and, if McCain can successfully sell that message, it will find resonance with that desperation.

Of course, anyone with half a clue about these things knows that off-shore drilling is a joke. It isn’t going to have any impact on gas prices for at least 10 years and, even then, the effect will be minimal and very short-term. Al Gore delivered this message as a powerful political punch on July 17th when he said:

It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now.

Am I the only one who finds it strange that our government so often adopts a so-called solution that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem it is supposed to address? When people rightly complain about higher gasoline prices, we propose to give more money to the oil companies and pretend that they’re going to bring gasoline prices down. It will do nothing of the sort, and everyone knows it. If we keep going back to the same policies that have never worked in the past and have served only to produce the highest gasoline prices in history alongside the greatest oil company profits in history, nobody should be surprised if we get the same result over and over again. But the Congress may be poised to move in that direction anyway because some of them are being stampeded by lobbyists for special interests that know how to make the system work for them instead of the American people.

If you want to know the truth about gasoline prices, here it is: the exploding demand for oil, especially in places like China, is overwhelming the rate of new discoveries by so much that oil prices are almost certain to continue upward over time no matter what the oil companies promise. And politicians cannot bring gasoline prices down in the short term.

However, there actually is one extremely effective way to bring the costs of driving a car way down within a few short years. The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.

But this is not the consistent message being sent by Barack Obama, the Democratic party, or the progressive blogosphere.

McCain is, on the one hand, openly embracing every possible solution to the emerging energy crisis in this country. (Whether or not he’ll actually follow through on anything not approved by his lobbyist buddies in the oil industry is another story, of course.) On the other hand, the Republicans are successfully turning off-shore drilling into a wedge issue.

And the result, as seen over the past couple of weeks, is that, according to national polls, McCain is now considered the better candidate on energy issues than Obama — a result so absurd that I wouldn’t have believed it possible two months ago.

The problem here is the false “either-or” argument being used by progressives. As long as progressives keep framing the issue as “either you’re for renewable energy or you’re for off-shore drilling”, then McCain’s message of “I’m for both and for anything else that will help lower energy prices” is going to win. And win big.

And the reason he’ll win big is that, if off-shore drilling were truly a viable solution, then we probably should be doing it.

The reality is that it isn’t a viable solution. And, therefore, the correct response to this nonsense is to simply point out that it is, in fact, nonsense. Accurately attack the viability of the non-solution.

Because in the battle between the guy saying “you can have a piece of cake or a piece of pie” and the guy saying “you can have both cake AND pie”, the guy with the bigger dessert tray is going to win… unless you point out that that the pie is actually a mirage masking another handout to the big oil companies.

Barack Obama: What Can I Do? Jared Diamond’s Worst Mistake I Was Not Speeding (Thanks Governor Palin!)