Analysis: Telling truth in energy debate

WASHINGTON, June 13 (UPI) -- Sen. Barack Obama so far is narrowly winning the debate on the economy in the public mind, but in reality Republicans and Democrats both need to learn from each other and overcome their own deepest prejudices to deal with the oil price crisis.

A CNN/Opinion Research Poll of registered voters released Thursday gave Obama, D-Ill., a slight edge over GOP standard-bearer Sen. John McCain of Arizona on the economy.

The survey was carried out among 921 registered voters June 4-5 with a margin of error of plus/minus 3 percentage points.

Obama's real but still far from unassailable lead over McCain was confirmed Thursday by a Gallup poll that gave him an overall 6-point lead over the Republican front-runner by 48 percent to 42 percent.

McCain, in fact, is doing remarkably well, given the overall Republican weakness. Indeed, whether he wins or loses the election, if he continues to run as far ahead of congressional Republicans as he has so far, the end result may be a dramatic change in the nature of the Republican Party in Congress and at grassroots levels throughout the country.

For the Gallup poll also noted that despite the deeply expressed antipathy to McCain expressed repeatedly by hard-core conservatives, he already has succeeded in unifying his party base behind him to a far greater extent than Obama has the Democrats.

Gallup found an impressive 85 percent of Republicans backing McCain, while only 78 percent of Democrats backed Obama.

Gallup said it conducted its poll with 5,299 registered voters and it had a margin of error of plus/minus 2 percentage points.

The two polls suggest that while Obama has established a solid lead over McCain, he continues to run far weaker than general economic conditions and the general balance of popular support between the two main parties indicate.

As we have noted before, both Republicans and Democrats remain wedded to their old fixed ideas on the economy, even though any sensible energy policy would combine points from both platforms and abandon others.

Republicans remain implacably opposed to spending public funds on a major investment in public transportation for major urban areas around the United States, even though most energy experts believe such a program is essential to Americans' insatiable thirst for imported oil.

And Democrats continue to flatly oppose permitting offshore drilling off the coast of Florida and elsewhere, or the exploitation of enormous, still-untapped coal and oil shale fields in the American West, even though doing so would save the United States scores of billions of dollars in imported energy costs in only a few years.

McCain and Obama, in fact, agree on bashing oil companies, and both share U.S. President George W. Bush's magical/romantic belief that "American Science and Technology" will somehow allow biomass, wind and solar-generated energy to replace much of our coal, nuclear and oil needs in a decade or so, and magically lower energy prices at the same time.

Judged in this context, there is still plenty of room for McCain and the Republicans to go on the counterattack on economic and energy issues against Obama. But while there are real differences on energy policy between McCain and Obama, neither of them has dared to ask, let alone answer, the really important questions on America's energy future. Neither has President Bush.