Want an accurate re-election number for Obama, poll people at the pump.

As I went out to do my door to door for the radio show I went to get gas at the low­est price sta­tion in town and paid $3.829 per gal­lon, almost 60 cents more than just a month or two ago.

I took the lib­erty of talk­ing to other peo­ple there as we filled. One on a fixed income who can’t afford what he is pay­ing, another a white-​collar worker shak­ing his head say­ing we just have to take it, and a third a blue-​collar employee whose boss can’t afford a pay raise or even the reg­u­lar hourly rate for his job as he copes with the higher priced gas. All agree we are near or at the break­ing point.

And here in Fitch­burg Gas prices are lower than most of the state and much of the coun­try. If peo­ple are say­ing this about gas at $3.820 what will they be say­ing when it reaches $4, $5?

Any­thing who thinks Pres­i­dent Obama will get re-​elected with gas prices in their cur­rent state is out of their mind.

Update: A reminder of a promise kept

Update 2: Chris is talk­ing trends, let’s remind Chris what caused that trend to be bucked:

See that big peak in the mid­dle? That was the last oil spike, in the sum­mer of 2008. Notice how the price hit a high point, then fell off a cliff afterwards?

The day cor­re­spond­ing to that peak, an all-​time high of $145.16/barrel, was July 14, 2008. By some strange coin­ci­dence, that was the very same day then-​President George W. Bush lifted, by exec­u­tive order, a fed­eral ban on off­shore oil drilling.

Bush’s order was, of course, imme­di­ately dis­missed by the “experts.” Reuters waved away the action as “a largely sym­bolic move unlikely to have any short-​term impact on high gaso­line costs.” Barack Obama’s cam­paign lec­tured that if “off­shore drilling would pro­vide short-​term relief at the pump or a long-​term strat­egy for energy inde­pen­dence, it would be wor­thy of our con­sid­er­a­tion, regard­less of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, con­cede it would do neither.”

Yet the end result was sur­prise surprise:

For com­modi­ties traders who’d been pric­ing oil based on a sup­po­si­tion of scarcity, the poten­tial for mil­lions of addi­tional bar­rels on the mar­ket hit like a thun­der­bolt. The sim­ple act of putting America’s resources on the table popped the oil bub­ble, and a stun­ning price drop fol­lowed in short order. By elec­tion day, Novem­ber 4, the price of a bar­rel of crude had plum­meted to $70.84 — a 51% decrease in less than five months.

And Obama:

Bush exec­u­tive order was offi­cially reversed on Feb­ru­ary 8, 2011.

The price of crude that day was $85.85. By April 19, it had risen to $107.18, with no end in sight.

Color me unsurprised.