Gasoline prices are on the rise again, and the cascading effect of higher gas prices has the Biden administration and its Democratic allies nervous.
Gasoline prices are on the rise again, the pain of which is felt not just at the pump but in the purchase of every good that relies on the combustion engine to make its way to your doorstep. The cascading effect of higher gas prices has the Biden administration and its Democratic allies nervous. At least, that’s what trained eyes can detect from the subtle cues voters are receiving from the press. Take, for example, Politico’s latest attempt to defuse this political time bomb:
“The U.S. is pumping oil faster than ever,” read Politico’s headline on reporter Ben Lefebvre’s latest. “Republicans don’t care.” The heading is an accurate summary of what follows.
“The GOP narrative has a major hole,” Lefebvre wrote. “U.S. oil production — already the highest in the world — is on track to set a new record this year,” but the global market has not responded with alacrity to the introduction of new supplies. That demonstrates the limits on any president to do much about the price of gas. Shameless shills that they are, though, this timeless economic truth hasn’t stopped “GOP White House hopefuls from lambasting Biden and his energy policies, including the green incentives included in the climate law he signed a year ago.”
Lefebvre’s claim that gas prices are not entirely responsive to domestic U.S. energy outputs is defensible. His implication that Biden’s policies have in no way contributed to upward pressure on gas prices is arguable, at best. His attempt to discredit the GOP’s attacks on market-distorting “green energy” spending in a bill sold to voters as an anti-inflation measure is laughable.
We could devote ourselves to litigating each of these claims in their particulars, but that would be to miss the point of this exercise. What we are confronted with is a political messaging strategy in which the particulars are fungible. At least, that’s what we must conclude from a piece Lefebvre co-authored in 2018, which the outlet accurately summarized: “Democrats steal GOP playbook to attack Trump on gas prices.”
“A spike in gasoline prices is giving Democrats a rare chance to borrow an old Republican tactic: pounding the occupant of the White House for motorists’ pain at the pump,” the piece read. Gone is the tone of moral opprobrium reserved for Republicans. It has been replaced with a grudging respect for the sharp-elbowed political gamesmanship Democrats merely borrowed from their unscrupulous opponents.
That item betrays Democratic fears in 2018 that Donald Trump would reduce the pressure on consumers with a strategic release of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve — a tactic grudgingly conceded by the authors as legitimate given Democrats’ embrace of it during the Obama years. Trump did just that in 2019. But when gas prices collapsed with the onset of the pandemic, Republicans sought to refill America’s reserves as part of the first tranche of Covid-19 stimulus. That initiative was blocked by Democrats, some of whom called it a “$3 billion bailout” for the oil industry. The Biden White House has continued to hemorrhage American petroleum reserves and is unable to replenish its stocks because, as the administration admits, gas prices are too high.
Indeed, Democrats are as capable of cynicism as anyone when gas prices become a political football. Democrats and “the experts” alike blamed Trump’s decision to exit from the Iran nuclear deal and tighten the sanctions on the Islamic Republic for a 2018 spike in prices at the pump. But not all.
“Perhaps 75% of the ascent for crude oil and gasoline was tied to the usual factors: a very disciplined OPEC agreement and global demand growth that has outpaced global supply growth,” said Oil Price Information Service analyst Tom Kloza. He assigned a marginal impact on gas prices to Trump’s Iran policy, as well as the the deterioration of Venezuela’s energy sector.
Nor are Democrats especially deferential to global market forces when gas prices present them with either a political opportunity or obstacle, depending on the levers of power in Washington their party happens to control. Under Democratic administrations, gasoline prices rise as a response to greed and gouging from the domestic energy sector. When a Republican is in office, pain at the pump is attributable to his policies — and, for good measure, our slovenly consumption habits, which forward-thinking lawmakers would curtail for our own good.
All this is to say that there is truth to the contention that complaining about gas prices is largely a political enterprise, though not entirely. But we don’t have to perform a forensic analysis on political media’s coverage of this dichotomy to arrive at the conclusion that the press regards one side’s cynical opportunism as fair game when the partisan roles are reversed. After all, the distinct implications in the New York Times’ headlines, “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices” and “Democrats Eager to Exploit Anger Over Gas Prices,” aren’t particularly elusive.