......”Mr. Gingrich, for his part, is leading with it, framing his speeches around energy and running a half-hour video of his ideas in key Super Tuesday states. His plan is to inspire enough voters to win his home state of Georgia, and to do well in the neighboring states of Tennessee and Oklahoma, picking up enough delegates to justify continuing. While the headlines have focused on his silly promise of $2.50-a-gallon gas (no president can guarantee a world price), the speaker’s bigger contribution has come in his crystallization of two key arguments for the fall campaign.
The first is his point that this is not the usual, boring energy debate. For decades the nation has deadlocked over America’s supposedly limited natural resources, fighting over whether high gas prices made it worth touching, say, the supposedly pristine Alaskan wilderness. It’s been a debate in the context of scarcity.
Mr. Gingrich’s savvy has been to grasp that this is over, done, passé. America is embarking on a seismic energy shift. A decade of technological advances—from 3-D mapping, to fracking, to horizontal drilling—has turned this country into a resources monster in oil and gas and coal. The old, tired GOP argument is that we need to drill for energy security. The new, rebooted argument is that America is primed to become the largest energy producer in the world, with all the money, jobs and benefits that come with it.
In the context of abundance, energy development is political gold for the GOP. As Mr. Gingrich notes: It is a winning economic argument, a shift that could create “more than a million new jobs.” It is a winning deficit argument, since royalties and profits become a new cash stream to the government. It is a winning little-guy argument, since the beneficiaries of fracking are “people who own the property,” like “farmers.” It’s a winning heartland argument, since cheap natural gas is the way to “increase our manufacturing base.”
Energy also becomes, and this is the speaker’s second point, one of the strongest contrasts with Mr. Obama.”....
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203986604577255761338883798.
Frack, drill. Why just one. Why not all.