Conservatives are unfairly using the temporarily-crashed price of gas for comparison to today's prices.
The unmanipulatable meta tag for the above photo, which I personally took at a gas station in Douglasville, Georgia:
Date Picture Taken: 9/13/2008 1:26 AM
When Clinton left office in 2001, gas prices were well under $2.00 per gallon. They remained in that range until Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. Much of the public supported the Iraq war because it was staffed with other people’s kids and funded with borrowed communist dollars -- they thought it cost them nothing. But in the long run, it helped wreck our economy and set gas prices on a steady upward trend -- as unrest in the Middle East always does.
Gas prices started a dramatic upward rise in 2003, immediately upon the launch of “Shock & Awe” which ignorant-of-consequences people gleefully cheered. When Katrina hit in 2005, prices spiked at well over $5.00 per gallon, at least here in Georgia. Like many other people in this area, when the gas stations started running out of gas, I went to Lowes and bought three 5 gallon gas containers and filled them up with almost $6.00 per gallon gas, so I would have a backup tankful at home. And while prices dropped back down to the just-over-$4.00 range in the weeks following Katrina, the overall steady upward trend continued, until gas was up to $4.55 in September 2008. And that wasn’t a spike; it was the natural point of a steady upward climb that had resulted after the Iraq invasion.
Source: Current Gas Prices and Price History
[Just as an observation, the chart incorrectly notes "Iran" invaded Kuwait instead of Iraq and for some inexplicable reason, Bush's Iraq War is not plotted, even though they felt it important to note the Iraq-Iran War and the Gulf War.]
Converging with the Bush-created Middle East unrest, to create the perfect storm, was the deregulation of Wall Street speculators. The price of a barrel of oil almost tripled from $50 in early 2007, to $147 in the Summer of 2008, largely due to artificial up-bidding by speculators -- which Republicans continue to prevent President Obama from regulating.
So where are conservatives getting the $1.89 per gallon figure that they claim Bush left for us? Two days after I made that photo, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Lehman shares fell more than 90% in that one day. The Dow Jones closed at more than 500 points less than when it opened that day. Over the next few days, the price of a barrel of light crude oil plummeted to just over $40 per barrel, crashing precipitously, like all other stocks and commodities.
Source: Light Crude Commodities Future Chart
And it is that temporarily-crashed price to which conservatives are comparing current prices. Of course, they would bristle if we used the temporary nearly-$6.00 per gallon after-Katrina spike for comparison.
The reality is, the only thing which has happened since the crash, is that prices have steadily recovered -- as the economy has recovered -- back towards where Bush had them prior to the crash. Still, prices have another dollar per gallon to go in order to get to the true price which Bush left for us.
To be clear, I’m not positing that the Iraq invasion created conditions which required or demanded that prices had to increase. I’m saying that unrest in the Middle East always gives speculators an excuse to up-bid the price of crude, and Bush gave them that excuse in 2003 with the Iraq invasion. And that remained a factor until we left Iraq at the end of 2011, overridden temporarily by the 2008 crash. But by the time we left Iraq, the new speculator excuses of unrest in Syria, and Iran threatening to close the Straights of Hormuz, were up and running. And since we know that we are domestically producing more oil now than at any time since before the Iraq war began, and we know that demand is actually down, the only solution is severe restrictions on Wall Street speculators.
It’s easy for thinking-for-themselves liberals to go so deeply into the esoteric weeds, that they lose the average bumper-sticker-wired brain. Conservatives understand this so much better than liberals; hence, their effectiveness in using wordsmithed empty-rhetoric slogans like “Drill, baby, drill” and taking a small simple lie and repeating it so often that it becomes irreversibly ingrained in the right wing collective psyche.
That's what’s happening with the “gas was $1.89 per gallon when Bush left office” meme. Unfortunately, in most of the pushback against Republican claims on gas prices, the fact that they are using this temporarily-crashed price for comparison is never mentioned. But it is that small, extremely-disingenuous fact that is being so effectively used right now by conservatives to whip their ranks into a frenzy against President Obama over gas prices.