LANSING, MICH. — With the politics of energy shifting as rapidly as gasoline prices, Democrats, led by presidential candidate Barack Obama, are retreating from long-held positions and scrambling to offer distressed voters more immediate relief from spiraling costs.
The change has been most striking on the campaign trail, where Obama said in a speech Monday that he would abandon his past position and support tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to quickly cut prices at the gasoline pump.
His campaign later released a statement saying that the "doubling of oil prices in the past year is a crisis for millions of Americans."
Obama's reversal on tapping the national stockpile of crude oil comes just days after he said, for the first time, that he would agree to some offshore drilling as part of a broader energy-policy compromise with Republicans, including John McCain, who has supported additional drilling.
Those shifts by Obama are indicative of the pressure that politicians of both parties -- but especially Democrats -- are under to develop specific, short-term energy proposals in the face of rising costs. Against that backdrop, politicians risk looking insensitive if they tout only solutions that could take years to hit the pump, such as Obama's plan to develop hybrid cars that can travel 150 miles on a gallon of gasoline.
Republicans, too, have responded to such pressures. McCain only recently endorsed expanding offshore oil drilling, embracing a pro-production GOP principle that he had previously opposed. And in Florida, where offshore drilling has been anathema, Republican Gov. Charlie Crist has dropped his stalwart opposition to such exploration.
That jockeying reflects a shift in public opinion that has upended policy debates as gas prices have soared and the economy has soured. In California, normally a hotbed of opposition to offshore drilling, a poll last month by the Public Policy Institute of California showed 51% of respondents favoring more drilling -- up 10 percentage points since July 2007, and the first time since the question was first posed in 2003 that a majority of Californians polled said they favored offshore drilling.
"It is just a frank reality: We have to do something," said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. "People have had to make some drastic changes in their own life, so they are ready to see the government make some choices."
