Last week, I wrote about U.S. Sen. John McCain's attempts to paint himself as a great champion of the American consumer who has been plagued by skyrocketing gas prices. And just how will McCain help bring relief? He has embraced offshore drilling, despite the fact that experts -- and even he -- have admitted that such drilling won't produce any tangible relief, if any, for a very long time.
Maybe McCain has a different sort of relief in sight -- relief for his fundraising efforts that lag far behind those of his rival, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. According to this very telling report in today's Washington Post's by Matthew Mosk, McCain just may have hit a gusher of his own -- the green kind, not the black kind -- when he reversed his position on offshore drilling earlier this summer. Acoording to the Post article:
Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month -- three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban -- compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.
McCain said the policy reversal came as a response to rising voter anger over soaring energy prices. At the time, about three-quarters of voters responding to a Washington Post-ABC News poll said prices at the pump were causing them financial hardship, the highest in surveys this decade.
Opening vast stretches of the country's coastline to oil exploration would help America eliminate its dependence on foreign oil, McCain said.
"We have untapped oil reserves of at least 21 billion barrels in the United States. But a broad federal moratorium stands in the way of energy exploration and production," he said. "It is time for the federal government to lift these restrictions."
McCain delivered the speech before heading to Texas for a series of fundraisers with energy industry executives, and the day after the speech he raised $1.3 million at a private luncheon and reception at the San Antonio Country Club, according to local news accounts.
"The timing was significant," said David Donnelly, the national campaigns director of the Public Campaign Action Fund, a nonpartisan campaign finance reform group that conducted the analysis of McCain's oil industry contributions. "This is a case study of how a candidate can change a policy position in the interest of raising money."
To find out more about who gives how much to whom, check out OpenSecrets.org at the Center for Responsive Politics.
