megimoo
10-26-2008, 11:37 PM
MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Seconds after Sen. John McCain mentioned reopening America’s coasts to oil and gas drilling, the shouts from the crowd erupted.
“Drill, baby, drill!” the voters in this Pittsburgh suburb cried.
Even though the price of gasoline has dropped like a Rob Johnson pass in recent weeks, the summertime price spike is still one of McCain’s signature issues — especially in this Democrat-leaning state where McCain is drilling harder for votes than he is anywhere else.
If you believe the polls, he’s digging a lot of dry holes. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Democrat Barack Obama with an 11-point lead in the Keystone State.
But with his campaign flagging in smaller onetime GOP strongholds such as Virginia and Colorado, McCain keeps plugging away in his fight for Pennsylvania’s 21 electoral votes, hoping the state’s big rural population will counter Obama’s strength in the state’s heavily populated southeast corner.
“He’s clearly making a stand in an environment that doesn’t seem all that welcoming for a Republican presidential candidate,” said Christopher
P. Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. “But he needs a win in a big state. It’s big risk, big reward.”
Last week showed McCain taking that big risk in a big way, investing a full day in three Pennsylvania campaign stops and then sending his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, to the Pittsburgh area on Thursday.
At each stop, the GOP candidates ripped into Obama as they have been doing for weeks — while touting their energy plans as the centerpiece of their effort to rebuild the American economy.
“When I’m president, we’ll drill offshore and we’ll drill now,” McCain said at his rally in Moon Township. “We’ll invest in clean coal technology . . . We’ll lower the cost of energy in months and create millions of new jobs. America, I promise you that.”
The promise of new offshore oil drilling is a new one for McCain, who opposed drilling until this year’s run-up in gas prices.
Obama, too, has flip-flopped on the issue, going along this fall as Congress let a long-standing ban on new drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific expire.
That ban is expected to resurface in the new Congress, though, and Obama has warned that offshore drilling is no answer for America’s energy needs.
“We’re going to have to explore new ways to get more oil, and that includes offshore drilling,” Obama said
during the presidential debate Oct. 7. “But we have 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world’s oil. So what that means is that we can’t simply drill our way out of the problem.”
http://www.buffalonews.com/180/story/474576.html
“Drill, baby, drill!” the voters in this Pittsburgh suburb cried.
Even though the price of gasoline has dropped like a Rob Johnson pass in recent weeks, the summertime price spike is still one of McCain’s signature issues — especially in this Democrat-leaning state where McCain is drilling harder for votes than he is anywhere else.
If you believe the polls, he’s digging a lot of dry holes. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Democrat Barack Obama with an 11-point lead in the Keystone State.
But with his campaign flagging in smaller onetime GOP strongholds such as Virginia and Colorado, McCain keeps plugging away in his fight for Pennsylvania’s 21 electoral votes, hoping the state’s big rural population will counter Obama’s strength in the state’s heavily populated southeast corner.
“He’s clearly making a stand in an environment that doesn’t seem all that welcoming for a Republican presidential candidate,” said Christopher
P. Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. “But he needs a win in a big state. It’s big risk, big reward.”
Last week showed McCain taking that big risk in a big way, investing a full day in three Pennsylvania campaign stops and then sending his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, to the Pittsburgh area on Thursday.
At each stop, the GOP candidates ripped into Obama as they have been doing for weeks — while touting their energy plans as the centerpiece of their effort to rebuild the American economy.
“When I’m president, we’ll drill offshore and we’ll drill now,” McCain said at his rally in Moon Township. “We’ll invest in clean coal technology . . . We’ll lower the cost of energy in months and create millions of new jobs. America, I promise you that.”
The promise of new offshore oil drilling is a new one for McCain, who opposed drilling until this year’s run-up in gas prices.
Obama, too, has flip-flopped on the issue, going along this fall as Congress let a long-standing ban on new drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific expire.
That ban is expected to resurface in the new Congress, though, and Obama has warned that offshore drilling is no answer for America’s energy needs.
“We’re going to have to explore new ways to get more oil, and that includes offshore drilling,” Obama said
during the presidential debate Oct. 7. “But we have 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world’s oil. So what that means is that we can’t simply drill our way out of the problem.”
http://www.buffalonews.com/180/story/474576.html