It’s a squeeze. At a service station near Portland one recent evening, the family was packed in the car amid beach gear, with Debbie at the wheel, Greg beside her and their two children, ages 3 and 6, trying to sleep in the back. With little space and scant elbow room, Greg was trying not to drop any McDonald’s fries on his wife’s lap.
“We don’t like this,” Debbie said through an open window. Yet she’s not sure who is to blame. Her husband, a Republican, said the gas prices are President Bush’s fault. But Debbie, a Democrat, wonders.
“I just don’t know how much control he has over this,” she said. “But it is getting ridiculous.”
High prices at the pump – the Bowens paid $2.30 a gallon – cut into pocketbooks of people everywhere. Some tend to blame whoever is president, angry that he can’t or won’t provide help when such basic activities as going to work, picking up kids at school or vacationing are growing more costly.
The danger that a perception will grow of a president sitting idly by while ordinary people struggle can be disturbing for the White House, given that presidents have few options to drive down prices in the short term.
Most recent presidents, from Richard M. Nixon through Bill Clinton, have faced political heat when gas prices were high. Now, at a time when Bush hardly needs more bad news, with his approval ratings hitting record lows over concerns about Iraq, the national average price for regular unleaded has topped $2 a gallon – a record before inflation is factored in.
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, Bush’s likely Democratic opponent, has sought to capitalize. He has argued that Bush could be helping – by pressuring oil countries to raise output or by reducing the amount of oil that flows into the national petroleum reserve. Kerry says instability in the Middle East, heightened by Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, has forced up the price of oil, in turn pushing up prices at the pump.
But gas-price politics are, if nothing else, complex. Opinion polls, industry analysts and interviews with nearly four dozen voters in such swing states as Oregon, New Mexico and New Jersey suggest that gas prices have the potential to hurt Bush by Election Day – especially if they stay high enough to keep angering motorists.
Yet Bush’s image and reputation appear to have suffered little. If prices fall back in the weeks or months before the election, Bush might dodge any real political harm.
In the nation’s “oil patch,” high gas prices don’t necessarily spell trouble for the president – Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma and the desert of northwest New Mexico, a politically diverse region of a state that Al Gore won by just 366 votes in 2000 and one that could be pivotal again this time.
Crude-oil and natural-gas wells dot the dry, scrubby landscape. The serenity of a desert sunset can be broken by a convoy of noisy tankers returning from the wells. There, the global oil prices that are driving up gas prices and infuriating drivers have been a boost to the local economy, and just maybe to Bush.
People are smiling – people like Shannette Armenta, a 40-year-old waitress who inherited mineral rights last year to 80 oil and gas wells. She said she sympathizes with friends who are struggling to pay at the pump. At the same time, she has raked in big dollars by charging petroleum companies the sky-high market prices for her raw fuels.
“Dude,” she said recently over beers at a tavern called the Wooden Nickel, a converted gas station, “I’m going on vacation.”
Armenta and her husband, who works in the natural-gas fields, are spending her extra income this Memorial Day weekend to ride motorcycles to a four-day Harley-Davidson festival in Red River, N.M.
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Armenta grew up on oil. She watched her family profit in booms and suffer in busts.
A registered Democrat who voted for Bush in 2000, Armenta has grown doubtful about his leadership as the violence in Iraq has persisted. But she is more likely to vote for Bush than she was a few months ago. With oil prices unpredictable, she said, she would trust a former oil man to try to manage the prices more than someone like Kerry, who has no experience in the energy business.
“This is what we live on here,” Armenta said. “The ones who are sniveling about gas prices – they don’t work in the oil fields. Let’s take them out on the patch. Bush – he comes from an oil and gas background.”
Debra Miller, the Wooden Nickel’s bartender, said she is an independent who backed Bush in 2000. She said she remains undecided and thinks the surge in gas prices is “ridiculous.” But she isn’t blaming the president. Oil-producing countries and big oil firms, she said, are setting prices and making big bucks off the boom, while politicians have little to do with it.
“It’s just these same companies making money every time,” Miller said.
A looming problem
On its face, the gas-price issue should not be a serious threat to Bush’s re-election. The average price per gallon has remained, when adjusted for inflation, nearly a dollar lower than in 1981, when eye-popping prices shook the economy. Recent polls show that when voters are asked who is to blame, only about one in 20 point to Bush. And some analysts say people are growing accustomed to price swings and less convinced that politicians can control them.
Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said that in the 1970s and 1980s, many Americans “thought cheap gas prices were written into the Constitution.”
Now, he said, “Americans have come to know this is about supply and demand, and that they have contributed to it by buying one gas-guzzling SUV after another. Prices go up, prices go down, and most people have gotten the message that politicians don’t control the gas pumps.”
Looked at more deeply, though, the issue still seems to loom as a pitfall for Bush. While only a small portion of Americans directly fault him, a majority blames either the war in Iraq or big oil companies – neither of which bodes well for the president, given that he launched the war and is a former oil man.
Richard B. Wirthlin, who was a pollster and strategist for former President Ronald Reagan and now runs his own polling firm, said if prices stay high, more voters are likely to doubt that the war was wise and to muse about whether Bush has ties to oil companies that help them profit at the expense of ordinary people. Such concerns, he said, are ripe for Kerry to exploit.
“The political damage for Bush may be greater than recognized,” Wirthlin said. “It’s an issue that could be very damaging for him.”
In interviews, many voters, especially those who remain undecided on Bush’s re-election, said they think he has little control over prices. But many say their sticker shock has led them to begin to doubt whether invading Iraq was wise and to wonder whether the president is too cozy with oil companies and whether high gas prices are a symbol of Bush’s slowness to act quickly when Americans suffer economic hardship.
Karen Brown, a 40-year-old mother of two who works at a mall in central New Jersey, is a Democrat who voted in 2000 for Bush. This year, she is undecided. Brown is also the owner of a Dodge Durango that now costs $88 a week to fill with gas.
“I’m just going to have to get rid of it,” she said between bites of lunch at the mall food court.
Will the price of gasoline weigh on Brown’s mind when she decides whether to back Bush again? “Maybe,” she said.
Brown said she supported Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq. “It had to be done.”
She said the president’s policies seemed to aid economic recovery. “He did an OK job.”
But if gas prices don’t fall noticeably by Election Day, she said, she might view Bush as having failed to handle a problem that slices into her family’s budget and makes it hard to drive to work or to take two sons to their baseball games.
“I’d think [Bush] really didn’t try hard enough,” she said, without specifying what he should do. “I know it’s not just him. But that would kind of push me away from voting for him.”
One person who knows about the political risks associated with gas prices is Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico. The Democrat, who was energy secretary in the Clinton administration, was on a short list of potential running mates for Gore. But in 2000, gasoline prices shot up. Richardson said those prices, coupled with security breaches and charges of espionage at some nuclear labs, created a “perfect storm” that made him a potential liability.
“I don’t believe I was blamed for the high gas prices,” he said in an interview in his office in Santa Fe. “But there was a clear concern in the administration that high prices would hurt Gore. So it was a factor.”
Issue hits home
Richardson, a leading Kerry ally, noted that with prices high this year, oil sales have helped deliver $50 million more in state revenue than expected, a fact Richardson has celebrated. But, he suggested, if prices continue “to creep upward, and Bush is seen as not responding, it’s going to become a problem for him. How serious? As much as Iraq? No. But it is something voters can identify with everyday.”
Bush’s policy and political advisers face a quandary: Gas prices are mostly out of the president’s control. And administration officials have stressed that Bush delivered an energy bill to Congress that they contend would make the nation less reliant on foreign oil in the long term and less likely to suffer price shocks.
“But there are not any short-term fixes,” said Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans, a longtime Bush friend and former oil executive. He said the president knows that developing new sources of energy “takes long-term planning.
“That’s why the president put out a plan three years ago,” Evans said. “And he continues to wait for that energy bill from Congress.”
The president has some options that could, analysts said, modestly ease the price of gasoline and signal to voters that he is acting to help. But adopting those steps might fuel a perception that he was acting purely out of politics. He would also be abandoning his long-held view that free markets should be left alone.
Some Democrats, for example, have urged Bush to borrow oil from the nation’s emergency reserve. Kerry has proposed reducing the supply going into the reserve. Bush has refused.
The administration, meanwhile, has floated the idea of easing environmental restrictions that require specific blends of gasoline in some states to reduce pollution – rules that drive up prices. Environmentalists have expressed outrage at that possibility.
Bush has also been under pressure from critics who say he should “jawbone” oil nations to nudge them to expand production. But he has so far decided not to put much pressure on countries that are crucial allies in the volatile Middle East.
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Analysts stress that the effect of gas prices on Bush’s run for re-election will depend almost solely on voter perception. In interviews, staunch Republicans said they would never blame the president for high prices, while devoted Democrats were quick to invoke the issue as yet another reason to vote against him. Vital swing voters tended to offer more nuanced views.
Tina McBride, a registered Democrat who lives in a suburb west of Portland, said she has been frustrated, sometimes spending $150 on gas to drive her teen-age son round-trip to youth ice hockey games. She voted for Bush in 2000, saying she liked his focus on family values and education, and said she will back him again.
“These high prices have been a combination of the war in Iraq and the oil companies, but I really don’t blame the president,” she said. “He’s been looking after our country. He’s protecting us and has taken a stance.”
Then there are people like Wally Quintana, who sells homemade jewelry at an outdoor table surrounded by the adobe buildings of downtown Santa Fe, N.M. Quintana is a Democrat who nevertheless backed Bush in 2000, largely because of the president’s proposal to hold public schools more accountable.
But Quintana, who pays $20 every other day to fill up his van and commute 30 miles to and from his jewelry stand, said that his doubts about Bush have been growing and that he sees the president as too focused on war and paying scant attention to the economic hardships of Americans, especially those struggling to afford gas.
“He’s just up there concentrating on being a superpower,” Quintana said.
“It’s like I always say around here – slap a badge on someone, give him some authority, and it goes right to their heads. John Kerry is right: Bush is doing nothing to lower our gas prices. We have enough reserves, don’t we? Bush should draw from the reserves. He has got to help keep our economy rolling. This is how the people of this country get around – we’ve got to fill up our tanks.”
<!– ART CREDITSTEVE DIPAOLA : SPECIAL TO THE SUN
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTTo save gas on weekends, Greg and Debbie Bowen drive their smaller car when traveling to the Oregon coast with their daughters Samantha (left) and Vanessa.
CUTLINE TEXT–> <!– ART CREDITBRETT BUTTERSTEIN : SPECIAL TO THE SUN
ART CREDIT–> <!– CUTLINE TEXTAlthough she calls the recent rise in gas prices "ridiculous," Debra Miller, a bartender in New Mexico, says she holds big oil companies and foreign countries responsible and doesn't blame President Bush.
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