With oil at a mind-blowing $120 a barrel, the Senate overwhelming approved a measure 97-1, that would stop the shipment of oil to the government's emergency reserve. President Bush opposes letting the reserve, which is 97% full, drop below full capacity.

Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said, "We are buying the most expensive crude oil in the history of the world and storing it. When American consumers are burning at the stake by high energy prices, the government ought not be carrying the wood." Dorgan acknowledged that this is not the solution to the problem of high gas prices.

The only opposition came from Republican Senator Wayne Allard of Colorado. A House vote on the issue should come later today.

Fresh off a gas tax holiday idea that over 200 economists (including noted elitist Nobel Prize winners) have panned, Hillary Clinton has followed-up with another startling proposal sure to rouse populist blood pressure but, like the tax holiday, never amount to a hill of beans. As oil prices have reached record levels, Hillary has sensed a campaign opening, so she's sticking with the "Gas" category, but raising the wager somewhat. Now, she's going after the big boys: OPEC, your days are numbered. As Ben Smith reported yesterday, Hillary boldly declared the following:

"We're going to go right at OPEC. They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that can get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they're going to produce and what price they're going to put it at."

And the Indiana crowd applauds, Mission Accomplished. A couple of problems: OPEC isn't to blame for our sorry state of affairs, and a President Clinton would be hamstrung to do anything about it even if it was. But hey, it sure made for a nice campaign speech.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has released a devastating ad aimed at Barack Obama titled "What's Happened." The :30 second ad is airing in both Indiana and North Carolina.

The following definitions come to us from the Oxford English Dictionary:

pander v.
1. trans. To act as a pander to: to minister to the gratification of (another's lust).
2. To lay the pander, to sub-serve or minister to base passions, tendencies, or designs.

For another dimension of just what it means to "pander," we might also consult a thesaurus and look up the word "politics." Yes, political campaigns are, by definition, all about ministering to the gratification of another's lusts. Paid political consultants are hired to locate our basest desires, so that each candidate can exploit them. It sometimes seems as though the electorate is just one big focus group; A mountain of statistical clay from which each candidate will interpret and repackage so as to formulate his or her road-map leading to higher office. We are sliced and diced. Weighed and measured. Used and often discarded. Yes, we know perfectly well what pandering is.

This year's presidential candidates were not the first to pander, nor will they be the last. But there have been some classic moments in Pander-Fest '08. Here, then, a brief round-up.

John McCain, like other GOP hopefuls, executed a dizzying display of pandering to the Religious Right at the start of the campaign. Knowing that he couldn't win the nomination without the support of at least a portion of those he once termed "agents of intolerance" he set about courting the votes of the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberston and John Hagee. These ministers three have all, as Frank Rich detailed in Sunday's NY Times, each repeatedly made remarks glaringly similar to those of Jeremiah Wright. If it is conspiratorial to say that the US prompted 9/11 with what Wright sees as our own "terrorist" foreign policy, then surely it is equally dubious to claim that God was punishing New York on 9/11 and New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina for those two cities' permissiveness toward homosexuality. McCain has refused to renounce the support offered him by Hagee, recently saying he was proud to have Hagee's endorsement.

The focal point of the Democratic Primary race this week has been the debate over a proposed "gas tax holiday," with Senator John McCain first to propose lifting the gas tax for the summer, and then with Hillary Clinton proposing a windfall profits tax to offset the lost revenue from the tax reprieve. Senator Barack Obama has opposed both measures, citing near-unanimous agreement among economic experts that such a measure would result in little or no decrease in gas prices while wreaking havoc on construction jobs.

When asked on Thursday to produce even one policy expert who agreed with the measure, the Clinton campaign was unable to, responding instead:

Phil Singer: There are times when a President will take a position when a broad concensus of "experts" will agree and there are times when a President will do something that a group of "experts" does not agree with and this is something that Senator Clinton believes is the right policy... Presidents listen to advice and then act and that is what Senator Clinton is doing.

The rest of the call didn't go any better, as Singer, Wolfson, and Geoff Garin fielded a withering barrage of questions about the proposed gas tax holiday. Senator Clinton herself echoed the sentiment on This Week.

Senator Clinton's campaign has formed a narrative that their candidate is rock-solid on policy, while her rival is less so and more adept at empty rhetoric, but this issue has the potential to stand that idea on its head. The campaign finds itself on the wrong side of a policy battlefield, and is fighting hard to get voters to ignore the experts and rally behind Senator Clinton's plan. Behind the scenes, the campaign seems to be locking down its message, most recently in response to this ad.

From Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor:

When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

I know several economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn't heard her remark and said he couldn't believe she'd say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as "politics as usual."

Er, you can say that again. Discounting expert opinions and stubbornly sticking to bone-headed policy ideas: Sounds pretty familiar after 8 years of George Bush, no? More Reich:

The gas tax holiday is small potatoes relative to everything else. But it's so economically stupid (it would increase demand for gas and cause prices to rise, eliminating any benefit to consumers while costing the Treasury more than $9 billion, and generate more pollution) and silly (even if she won, HRC won't be president this summer) as to be worrisome. That HRC now says she doesn't care what economists think is even more troubling.

Following the bizarre logic of discounting the advice of those who are the most learned about a given subject, one can recall an eerily familiar pattern. Global warming? Why should we put our lot in with those meddling climatologists? Force levels in Iraq? Why listen to dissenting voices at the Pentagon? All those informed opinions are really just so elitist, right? Isn't that what the average voter wants to hear? It's all a bit like a Stephen Colbert sketch come to life. Video after the jump.

On Thursday's Clinton campaign conference call, Phil Singer was unable to name a single expert who agrees that the gas tax holiday is a good idea. Now, the Obama campaign has released statements from one of Hillary's newly declared superdelegates, North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, that show the Governor opposing gas tax holidays.

Then, on today's Obama conference call, Senator Claire McCaskill had this exchange with me:

Tommy Christopher: (In reference to Singer's response on the experts)Do you think there's something to that, that a leader has to do the right thing sometimes, even if the experts disagree? I

Senator McCaskill: It's important, when you're making policy decisions that have broad implications to America's families, it would be pretty important to have somebody who agreed with you, who knew something about economics. I think it would show a lack of judgment, frankly, to move forward with a policy...unless you didn't really mean it, unless you were just doing it for an election ploy...if you didn't have any intention of the policy ever really going into effect, but you were just trying to get votes, then perhaps it wouldn't be as important to not have any experts agree with you.

It was not quite an accusation, but more than an implication that Hillary Clinton is playing wedge politics with the gas tax holiday.

Maybe I'm naive, but th thought hadn't occurred to me. It's an old but effective political tactic, to introduce an impossible-to-fund bill that sounds great, like "Fancy Feast for all Kittens," then try to get your opponent on record as hating kittens.

Senator Clinton is risking a lot of her credibility on the economy with this move, so it's hard to tell where th best answer is for her. If the tax holiday passes, but is a failure, it will be damaging. If it never passes, she still gets to be the hero and avoids the blowback. With options like that, how big an issue is her sincerity, anyway?

Hillary Clinton isn't backing down. She's got a terrible idea, and she sticking to it. The idea, one she shares with John McCain, is to give drivers across America a gas tax holiday, despite a universal outcry from economists, environmentalists, fellow politicians, and superdelegates that the proposal amounts to nothing more than a disastrous, and shameless pander to voters.

That's not stopping Clinton, who yesterday reiterated her claim that her proposal would do what everyone with a modicum of common sense knows it won't. At a rally in Indiana, Hillary employed George Bush's black-and-white, either-or rhetorical framework. On the gas tax, you're either with the people, or you're with the gas companies:

"I believe it would be important to get every member of Congress on record," Clinton told a rally in southern Indiana. "Do they stand with the hard-pressed Americans who are trying to pay their bills at the gas station or do they once again stand with oil companies?

"I want to know where people stand and I want them to tell us, are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies?" she added.

Clearly, Clinton has not read a newspaper or gone online lately.

South Bend, Indiana got a treat today. Hillary rode with a regular lunch pail guy and got regular gas and tsk'd-tsk'd over the cost. One thing to remember is that every campaign uses a lot of energy, even photo ops highlighting a popular campaign promise - the gas tax holiday. The AP reports:

The Democratic presidential candidate and sheet metal worker Jason Wilfing, 33, pulled into the station in a large white Ford 250 pickup truck, Clinton riding shotgun.

[snip]

Trailing Wilfing and Clinton was a Secret Service motorcade consisting of six gas-guzzling Suburbans, two squad cars and a green SUV bearing photographers and TV cameras.

Hillary paid for the gas. I guess if this campaign continues on much longer, I might even consider ANWR.

While she was there, she got a hankering for a regular-guy cup of gas station coffee. My friend Paddy from Cliff Schecter's place grabbed this memorable moment. Looks like she's a little out of practice. Anything not to be elitist!

Hillary Clinton and John McCain think that a "gas tax holiday" is a great idea. Barack Obama, on the other hand, sees the proposal as nothing more than a gimmick designed to pander to voters in an election year. Obama:

"That's typical of how Washington works. There's a problem: everybody's upset about gas prices. Let's find some short term, quick fix. That we can say we did something, even though we're not really doing anything. Because if you actually took away the gas tax, what are the oil companies going to do? They're gonna raise your gas by 5 cents. You'll never see the savings. And then we pretend to do something."

According to economist Dean Barker, the suspension of the current 18.4 cent per gallon tax won't add up to squat for the average consumer:

Actually, almost all economists would agree that the tax cut proposed by Senators Clinton and McCain would save consumers nothing. With the supply of gas largely fixed by the capacity of the oil industry (they claim to be running their refineries at full capacity), the price will not change in response to the elimination of the tax. The only difference will be that money that used to go to the government in tax revenues will instead go to the oil industry as higher profits.

What's more, the proposed summer break for the gas tax will do nothing to actually lower the price of oil.