I've learned that you can discover some really interesting things listening to people talk about their concerns, which is to say eavesdropping. This last week, I learned something pretty interesting about the current price of gas and its potential as both a populist and progressive issue.
Last week, an E. coli lawsuit I'm working on had me spending the week in Brainerd, Minnesota, for some depositions further "up north" in Walker. I had some time to kill before my flight back to Seattle, and so I stopped at The Barn restaurant for some Made-Rite (http://www.maid-rite.com/) and slice of homemade pie. I sat on a stool at the counter, and next to me were five guys from mid-40's to 70-ish. They were talking about how expensive gas had become, and their thought that it would never be relatively cheap again.
The guy sitting next to me remarked that the price of oil was just another way that "rich people got richer without any thought of how it hurt people just trying to get by." Another pointed out how "that Bush" was always all about oil, and that he and Cheney "probably thought that all that Iraq oil was going to make their oil-buddies even richer." From here (and this is what surprised me) the four of them then spent the next twenty minutes talking about bio-fuel and other forms of alternate energy. One guy brought up Honda's new hydrogen car, which all of them had heard of, including that it was only being leased to a few people, and that you had to live near Irvine, CA because that was the only place that had hydrogen fueling stations. They all agreed that the country needed more stations like that, and that "people need a way to get to work that don't bankrupt them." One other guy then talked about fuel that could be created by algae--something that I had never heard of then.
What was so interesting about this discussion was how clearly they saw the connection between gas and the ability to go to not only go to work each day, but to preserve some shred of the American Dream. There was not one complaint about gas taxes, or a mention of the need to drill offshore. The discussion was focused almost exclusively on the need to develop alternate energy forms, and how the availability of affordable fuel was key to their continued economic well-being. I thus think that this issue represents an important opening to blue-collar voters that don't want to be spoken down to, but only want the continued opportunity to work hard to try to get ahead. This is not just an issue for latte-sipping liberals; it is the kind of issue my dad, a retired dump-truck driver, would and does understand instinctively. I think the Democrats need to grasp and exploit this. People may not want to give up their big pickup, but I don't think they'll mind at all filling it with hydrogen.