With the Obama vs. McCain campaign in full swing , both candidates are taking small shots at each other in speeches and in TV/Radio ads. All of these comments are political bickering, catering to voters who are political junkies , ones who watch the 24 hour news channels religiously. It’s the political version of the Star or National Enquirer. While the candidates might say a lot in the amount of words, its still mostly the same old rhetoric from the same old playbook. All we hear is sound bites,, although on different topics, in the past it might be about Social Security now its Global Warming. While my horse in the race is McCain (the lesser of two evils), I am still not a huge supporter for many reasons ,including his embracing the left on Global Warming , a cause in which the media only shows one side of the story. I am not sure if McCain is doing this to pander to this crowd (who will never vote for him) or does he really believes all of the hype.

For years, environmentalists have stopped any progress in the area of energy. While our population has grown, our supply hasn’t. For some reason this small minority has tied our hands, which has now snowballed to our current dire situation we have now; record high oil and natural gas costs and rising food costs. United States citizens are getting fed up and are wanting answers from our politicians but all we get are unrealistic solutions and spreading the blame. We have known about this upcoming energy crisis since the Arab oil embargo of the 70’s, but our so called “representatives” in Washington DC has dragged their feet like they have done with every other issue, with short sighted vision. Now they constantly trying to solve issues when they have become almost to big to tackle. We have seen this with the upcoming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare and with immigration. In he case of immigration a HUGE majority of Americans at least wants to build a fence to stop any future immigrants from coming in . Washington can’t even agree on this simplest of things. While I have called the US Senate one of the most worthless bodies of government in the world, the House of Representatives are climbing the list. The house used to be a worthwhile body with great ideas banded about has been useless as of late. What ever happened to the Republican Revolution of 1994. But I digress.

While most polls have Obama up in double digits, its early and McCain still has a good chance but he has to do a few things. (I don’t believe polls for several reasons: One, they are usually liberal leaning, Second, with the do not call lists and more Americans using cell phones as their primary phone, I don’t think you get a large pool of citizens.) Besides of nominating a true conservative as a running mate, the first thing he has to do, is to realize that this is an important race that Republicans need to win knowing that they won’t gain any seats in either houses of Congress. He needs to stop pandering to the center and the left who will never vote for him and to rally the base of the party, assuring them that he is one of them (even if it kills him, figuratively) so they feel energize to get off the couch and vote. Voter turnout is the most important thing to any election in an equally divided political America.

The second thing he has to do to win, is aggressively hammer on topics that a large majority of Americans are interested in, now it’s the cost of energy. It’s true that voters vote with their pocket books and are looking for someone with answers. First item he needs to hammer is the need to drill in Alaska and off shore. On this topic, the left is dictating the conversation. Instead of talking about increasing supply of energy they talk about ideas that most Americans will never embrace. They talk about the problems of drilling offshore and how the drilling will affect the pristine Anwar reserve. Both of these aren’t true, drilling would be done at least 50 miles off shore, no one will even see the rigs from land, and I haven’t heard of an oil spill from a rig in a long time, shoot all rigs survived hurricane Katrina without a drop of oil spilled into the gulf. . As for Anwar we are talking about setting up shop in a very small mostiquto infested bog part of the reserve. All McCain needs to do is reassure Americans that with the current technology, drilling is very safe. Plus, if we don’t’ drill off shore other countries are lining up to. He can also state, that drilling is a national security issue by reliving our dependence from foreign sources of oil. He can also frame the discussion it by saying this is the quickest thing we can do to alleviate prices (just the prospect of us drilling will lower prices) while technology catches up with hydrogen and better hybrid cars. Realistically we will be dependant of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.

Besides drilling he also needs to talk about he importance of building new power plants and refineries all across America. The majority of them needs to be nuclear or coal. I am not a big believer in using natural gas to make electricity because of the issues of finding new reserves and the transportation of it. By using natural gas to make electricity , it makes our heating costs go up a double whammy. Its like using food for gas making our food prices go up. How short sighted is that. With the technology we have, nuclear power is safer than ever and coal is many times cleaner. We have enough coal to supply power for hundreds of years, but again a small minority is controlling our energy policy.

McCain as talked on the subject of off shore drilling and nuclear power, he speeches haven’t been that forceful about the importance of these issues. His view on off shore drilling is to let the individual states to decide on it , not to forcefully campaign to the voters and the states to the start drilling NOW. I know that it will take a decade for any of these ideas to take affect but it doesn’t help by delaying this any longer, we should have had this debate 20-30 years ago but there were more important things going on, the Iran Contra trail, what congressman gets what earmarks etc, all they do in Washington is talk, so its time as Americans that we do the talking and have a hand in our own energy policy loaded with common sense and realistic ideas.