Stardate 20040411.1852

(On Screen): Few things get your attention more effectively than having someone shooting at you. War has a tendency to bring things into focus, and to make people realize what truly is and is not important.

William Schneider writes:

The month of March delivered some pretty bad news for the Bush campaign: the controversy over Richard Clarke's charges that the Bush administration did not take the threat of terrorism seriously enough before 9/11; record-high gasoline prices; and continuing violence in Iraq. Nevertheless, Bush seems to have made gains over presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry, going from 8 points behind in an early-March Gallup Poll to 4 points ahead in late March. A poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed Bush 9 points behind the senator from Massachusetts in mid-March but just 1 point behind in late March.

Rising gas prices are supposed to throw Bush, a Texan with ties to the oil industry, on the defensive. When gas prices last spiked, in March 2000, 39 percent of Americans complained that the prices were causing financial hardship, according to Gallup. Now, nearly half say gas prices are causing hardship. More than two-thirds of Americans call the gas price increases a major problem or a crisis. And many of those who feel that way support Kerry. A banner at Kerry rallies reads, "Low Gas Prices Fuel the Economy."

So the Bush campaign staged a pre-emptive strike by running a TV ad that calls attention to a statement Kerry made to the Boston Globe 10 years ago, when he referred to "my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax." The ad says, "People have wacky ideas like taxing gasoline more, so people drive less. That's John Kerry. He supported a 50-cent-a-gallon gas tax. If Kerry's gas-tax increases were law, the average family would pay $657 more a year."

That's his explanation of why higher gas prices didn't seem to hurt Bush.

I think it's something different: I think that people are much less concerned about gas prices now than they were in 2000, because in 2000 we weren't at war.

Perhaps current gas prices cause hardship. But there's hardship and there's hardship. Something which would be considered a serious impediment in the gentle days of 2000 is now seen properly as having minor significance.

Update 20040412: Scott writes to point out that when adjusted for inflation, gas prices are not ahistorically high now. That may be true, but people are generally more sensitive to change than level in something like this. Irrespective of how high the price is absolutely, if it is rising rapidly then it means that the person will have to spend more on it, leaving less money for other things. A person who rapidly goes from spending $200/month on gas to $300/month has $100 per month less in their pocket each month, even if $300/month is still cheap in historical terms.