By James P. Pinkerton
Contributing Editor and Columnist, “The American Conservative” magazine/FOX News Political Contributor

“We must embark on a national mission to end our dependence on foreign oil”—those are important words from John McCain, quoted in The Houston Chronicle this morning, under the headline, “McCain calls for end to offshore drilling ban/GOP candidate in Houston today to mend fences with oil industry.” Let’s hope McCain keeps it up, appealing to pro-growth voters, for the next five months. If he does, he can win the 2008 presidential election.

The opposition Democrats of course, have a paradoxical set of energy policies: they want to restrict production, increase taxation—and then complain about high gas prices. The Democrats should understand the fundamentals of supply and demand: the more demand, with fixed supply, the higher the price. That is, if you limit oil drilling (no ANWR, no new offshore drilling) even as domestic and world demand for oil continues to rise, then presto! –you are going to get a rise in prices. So the Democrats can raise oil taxes if they want—which will do nothing to increase supply—but such a tax hike is not going to help increase production. And then, of course, in addition, the Democrats (and some Republicans) want to push their “cap and trade” climate change legislation, which would impose trillions in new taxes and costs on the U.S. economy, while leaving China and India free to grow and perhaps overtake us. Nice!

But if the Democrats have a bad energy policy, McCain’s has been little better. For a long time, it looked as if McCain was not going to campaign as a conservative on energy issues, but was going to continue in his decades-long role as a “maverick,” which meant mostly taking policy positions that catered to the MSM aka the Mainstream Media. As McCain has demonstrated, such conservative-bucking tactics are a great way to get good press; but it won’t win the presidency, now that the MSM have found a Democratic candidate that they REALLY love. So while McCain had taken the politically correct positions on many issues, including ANWR and global warming—thus alienating conservatives—McCain was discovering that liberals were abandoning him, anyway. As I said on “FOX News Watch” two weeks ago, McCain has had the best press of any Republican in decades, but it’s all going to end, now that Barack Obama is on the national stage.

Just last week, National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote a brilliant column summing up the dilemma of the McCain campaign as it tried to carve out votes from liberals, as opposed to conservatives; Rich made the point that “Barack Obama famously couldn’t connect with working-class voters in the primaries, offering them an airy diet of hope and change. John McCain rose on his personal honor, which is why on energy he’s fumbling away the GOP’s best domestic political opening in years.”

In fact, the economic slowdown, including the spike in gasoline prices, gives Republicans a chance to attack Democrats as elitists, as “let-them-drive-bicycles”-type snobs; as polar-bear loving Greens who would rather worry about glaciers on the North Pole than about jobs for Middle Americans in North Carolina or North Dakota. The fearless visionary Newt Gingrich was an early advocate of tough pro-growth policies; his online petition drive, “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less,” has helped the former House Speaker—still very much a future leader for Republicans—gather 700,000 signatures in less than a month. In fact, as The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, the economic-energy crisis has given the down-so-long California Republicans their best issues-opening in years.

And now, finally, per The Chronicle this morning, McCain seems to be getting the message: “McCain will provide details of his proposal in a major energy-policy address today at the Hilton Americas Hotel in downtown Houston… his speech will describe a goal of energy self-sufficiency through a combination of aggressive domestic production and increased use of alternative energy sources.”

Hooray!

Now let’s see other Republicans get on board.