Barack Obama and Mitt Romney demonstrated again this week why they are going to be running against each other in November. The President has reversed course and okayed the completion of at least a portion of the Keystone oil pipeline. It is a move that will frustrate environmentalists, despite the fact that apparently the Environmental Protection Agency is satisfied with the safeguards that have been proposed by the Keystone people. Greenlighting this project will make conservatives happy (though they still won’t vote for President Obama), but it should also please moderates and independents.
Increasing our supply of oil will make prices go down. It might happen quickly, as speculators react to Keystone, or it might take a while, but in the long term it will help. Just like it would be helping us now if the government had allowed more drilling in 2008 when gas prices first spiked.
However it happens, the President should be hoping that gas prices stop going up or he’s probably going to be house hunting in January 2013.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney won another state. This time it was Illinois. His Republican opponents seem to be in an increasingly untenable position. Can they keep arguing that he isn’t really loved by conservatives when Republican voters keep picking Romney more than they are voting for anybody else?