During his recent swing to the West Coast President Obama told donors at an event in Los Angeles, "My poll numbers go up and down depending on the latest crisis, and right now gas prices are weighing heavily on people."
"These gas prices are killing you right now," Obama said at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, during a Town Hall meeting.
Back in Washington D.C., he made the soaring gas prices the subject of his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday.
"It's just another burden when things were already pretty tough," he said.
The President likely knows there is not much he can do about climbing prices, as long as Bernnake continues to print more money. But he will still have to put on a show.
He has ordered his Justice Department to form a task force to look for fraud or manipulation in the oil markets. It will "root out" any abuses, he told a town meeting in Reno, Nev.
Price inflation is a killer of Presidential re-election hopes. It had a lot to do with Jimmy Carter's failed re-election bid. One wonders what show Obama will put on once the price inflation becomes obvious across all goods. Are supply distorting, long-line creating, price controls in our future, as the next show?
Peter Schiff and other Austrians long ago predicted that price controls would be the government's response to rising prices caused by Bernanke's print-a-thon. Nothing new under the sun, I guess. Even if Obama knows price controls are bad economics (does he?), he'll have to do SOMETHING to show the ignorant masses he's in control. And he's not going to admit the real cause of rising prices.
ReplyDeleteObama-bread and Obama-gas lines aren't a lot prettier for a re-election than inflation.
ReplyDeleteObama's pretty screwed. Even if Bernanke acted to reverse his policies today (fat chance), we'd probably only be seeing the results about the time of next year's election. In all likelihood, he'd make the current recession worse in the process (although to the long-term benefit of the economy if they didn't re-inflate again later). Obama's only real hope is that the Republicans put up a neocon Obama-like clone to run against him. It's a virtual certainty that's exactly what the Republicans will do.
We can only hope that somehow Republicans get a clue and nominate Ron Paul. It's the perfect storm, but are Republicans even smart enough to come in out of the rain before the tornado strikes?