Monday, May 5, 2008

Gas Tax Holiday, it's great - Hillary promises...

Despite the results of a recent CBS News / New York Times poll showing that more people feel the gas tax holiday is a bad idea than good, Hillary is apparently taking Obama to the mat on this issue.
"What has happened to Barack Obama?" an announcer states in the new 30 second spot, among the campaign's most bruising to date.

"He is attacking Hillary’s plan to give you a break on gas prices because he doesn’t have one," the ad's announcer also says.
It is possible that the "announcer"* is correct and Obama is attacking Hillary's plan because he wasn't smart enough to think up such a silly proposal, but it may be more likely that he is attacking the plan because, well, it's just kind of stupid. It makes absolutely no sense to incentivize more oil consumption, thus maintaining heightened demand on our infrastructure, while at the same time failing to provide the adequate resources for maintaining this infrastructure. I guess the most suprising thing to me about this proposal and subsequent attack based upon it, is twofold. First, it suprises me that a Clinton would try to create a wedge issue out of something that apparently is a split in opinion polling. This makes sense only if you plan to beef up the assualt on the issue by shamelessly appealing to pie in the sky policies, whereby regular ole folks get cash in their pocket and we just take the cash from those big bad oil companies. The second big suprise is that the Clinton camp would willingly follow a McCain generated proposal. You would think that you couldn't mimick Republican policy proposals and still claim to be the true reformer.

* Don't you ever wonder who these announcers are? What must it feel like to be the person selected for having a creepy, frightening and negative voice?

3 comments:

Ken Graber said...

You don't have to wonder; story did a story on a couple of those announcers in 2006.

AM Donkey said...

bad link Gravy! But I'll look into it.

Ken Graber said...

Hmm, it doesn't work. Well, I found the full url again.

url