Obama’s Latest Ad
Here’s Barack Obama’s latest ad. Watch it, then leave a comment with your thoughts on it in the comment section (via Dean Esmay):
Dean comments:
I have never entirely understood the urge to specially tax so-called “windfall profits.” And I’m not sure that I believe that the Senator has the best plan to achieve energy independence. Still, it’s a pretty good commercial, and should appeal to a lot of voters, including a lot of centrists.
The reality of the matter is that energy independence isn’t feasible. It just won’t happen. Impossible.
I’ll never understand why American politicians aren’t just honest about this.
…and so begins the race to be the candidate who is most strongly opposed to high gas prices! Woe betide the hapless pol who defends Exxon these days. Can you say "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore?"
High gas prices have everything to do with the weak USD and rising demand for oil in other parts of the world…
Anyway, Obama continues to see sky-rocketing gains, as this blog points out;
Obama vs Clinton- Social Bookmarking Sites & the Web:
http://newsusa.myfeedportal.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=83
He obviously doesn’t know anything about commodities or capitalism. How is this different than Hillary saying, "…we’re going to take those profits [from the oil companies]…"? As soon as the government starts penalizing companies for making too much money, we can kiss our way of life goodbye.
Unfortunately, I can see this verbiage coming from McCain as well. We’re screwed.
Shows how much more he knows about economics than say, John McCain. The rising prices are due to supply/ demand, the weak dollar as Dave points out plus a few more items. What they are not is because greedy oil companies are gouging. They are making the same or less on a percentage of their revenues than they were before the price of oil was going up.
Think about this. $ billions spent on exploration. One offshore rig takes about 3-4 years to build and over $1B. Drill for oil a mile or so under the ocean or in places in the middle of nowhere like Kazackstan. $ billions to develop these fields. You have to find and pay for specialists willing to live in these shitholes and on platforms, and quite rightly pay pretty good salaries. Oil pipelines to take it to ports, ships to move it, platforms to offload it more pipelines, refineries that cost hundreds of millions to build and many millions to operate safely year after year, more pipelines, gasoline stations, fleets of tanker trucks - and it only costs $3/ gallon. They take all of this risk, invest all of this capital, and the one time in a generation where they are actually making a decent return, lets kill them. (BTW Barry - "making" money is the net income - not the overall revenue. You can have $40B in revenue and still not "make" a dime. Something that high school home ec should have taught you, you economic guru you)
I did not hear Barack & Hillary wanting to help the oil companies in the 90’s when their 10% profit margin on oil prices that had not increased in 15 years were causing bankruptcies and these mega-mergers just to stay in business.
Having said all that, I am not as pessimistic as Michael about not being able to achieve energy independence. Wind, solar & nuclear with a corresponding shift to more electric vehicles could make us independent in the time it took to build out some infrastructure. The hydrogen fuel cell is just a short way from being commercially viable, and as long as OPEC wants to keep supplies tight enough to keep oil prices at this level, it will hasten the day that these are built out.
I only hope it happens before we ruin the environment and economy by pursuing bio-fuels - the new crack for politicians and agri-businesses.
Pretty much agree with the commenters as to the content and message of the ad. And as for energy independence, it is a canard to act as though that’s achievable, but it’s still essential that we shift focus to alternative fuels and that would make us less dependent, but not independent- which is still a good thing.
I wanted to comment too on the style of the ad, which I thought was pretty appealing and probably effective. I like the feel of the direct, talking to the people approach, even though I didn’t agree with what he talked about so it didn’t ultimately work for me. For his target audience though, it’s probably a good ad.