Category: 
by Obama Pundit
That’s the sound of the cost of oil slowly rising. It is past $69 per barrel now and analysts see it hitting $85 soon.
The price at the pump, as much as anything, was a huge thorn in the side of the Bush Administration in 2007. People feel the pain of high gas prices almost every day. The last year has seen gas prices in the $2 per gallon range. If it gets above $3 per gallon, this will be trouble for Obama.
He has benefitted in his early days from relatively low gas prices that he inherited. If it starts to go up past $3 per gallon, you will start to see 5-8 percentage points come off his approval rating.
If that happens, it’s a whole new ball game in Washington.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Energy, Obama Pundit, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
We should start a pool on whom Obama will blame for this (other than Bush)! My guess is that he’ll blame the big oil companies and their “obscene profits”.
I think Obama will be able to utilize the rise in oil prices as justification for his ambitious energy policy. As such, I don’t think the spike at the pump will hurt him too badly – especially with his true-believers.
But rising oil prices also increase the cost of anything that is shipped – from clothing made internationally to food grown in another state to oil itself! Rising prices across the board could cost him a few points.