But so dependent is the nation on gasoline, not only for personal pleasure but for the movement of goods and the movement of workers to their jobs, that inflation in the price of gas will set off an inflationary spiral throughout the economy.
Driving a car will be more expensive, as will taking a plane. Food prices will escalate since most food is shipped long distances by truck; in fact, all products will rise in price since all goods move along gasoline-powered pathways.
And with rising gasoline prices Bush really has a problem. He is, after all, an "Oil President." His economic background, as was his father's before him, is in Texas oil. His friends are Texas oilmen. His vice president was a major oil-exploration company executive before he was tapped to run with Bush. Their campaign was funded, to the extent of many millions of dollars, by oil money: Over sixty million dollars flowed from the oil interests into Republican Party coffers in the last election.
Can Bush ignore this oil background in order to serve the people's interest? Of course. Will he? Absolutely, positively, not. There is no way the "Oil President" will abandon his old buddies, his financial supporters, his connections, his own personal economic interests.
Bush's problem is, of course, that Americans do not want to pay higher prices for gasoline, especially when prices at the pump double. At the same time Americans know full well that Bush and Cheney come from a Big Oil background. It doesn't take a sophisticated analyst to tell that higher gasoline prices, while they may devastate most working Americans, are a boon to the oil industry. When their wallets and pocketbooks are emptied just to gas up the family car, even working people who voted for Bush will concede that he is more concerned about his buddies in the oil industry than he is about the household budgets of American workers and their families.
Electricity prices, gasoline prices, are in a major upward spiral -- yet Bush has no desire to find short term solutions.
There are solutions which would bring immediate relief, such as federal planning of energy resource allocation, price controls, taxes on windfall profits, and energy conservation. It seems increasingly likely that energy will be Bush's first real test in office, and that, in the view of the American populace, he will fail that test.
The voting public, who go to the polls in a year and a half for Congressional elections, will be reminded of his failure every time they pull into a gas station to fill their tank. They will confront his failure every time their lights, television, and air conditioning go off for several hours in rolling blackouts.
It will be a long and difficult summer, not only to those who drive automobiles or expect their lights and appliances to work twenty-four hours a day, but for the man in the White House. His first real large test is upon him, and it looks like he is going to fail it -- to fail it, as the young in America say, big time.
Huck Gutman is the author, with Representative Bernard Sanders, of Outsider in the House as well as three other books.
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