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The drill team: Washington politicians say that tapping into sources of oil that were once off-limits is good for America. Is it also good for Texas?

Article Excerpt
Despite two presidential candidates who claim to exude bipartisan appeal, our nation has come to the eve of another election as bitterly divided as ever. The real surprise, however, is that we're no longer nursing grudge's over old favorites like race and religion or the war in Iraq; even 2004's most successful wedge issue, gay marriage, has remained on the shelf despite months of same-sex weddings that were green-lighted last spring by the California Supreme Court. Instead, in a year in which America earned a measure of redemption for centuries of racial division and injustice, we're suddenly learning how to hate one another over energy.

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At first blush, the energy issue seemed unlikely to dominate this election cycle, principally because Barack Obama and John McCain are almost two peas in a pod on global warming and its remedies. But give George W. Bush his due; when it comes to identifying the hot-button issues that divide us, our approval-challenged president is no lame duck. How else to explain the gusher of vitriol that erupted when he announced in mid-June that the first step to energy independence was lifting a ban on oil exploration in the waters off our coasts? Never mind that president George H.W. Bush had signed that ban back in 1990 and that Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, still supported it. Republicans rallied behind the president as if it were the run-up to the Iraq war. McCain, whose concession that "global warming is a real problem" had deeply chagrined the talk radio set, finally became a hero to the chattering right when he quickly flip-flopped on his long-standing opposition to offshore drilling. Obama, by contrast, waited more than a month, with opinion polls showing that Americans favored drilling almost two to one, before he announced he would accept a carefully "circumscribed" drilling strategy. By the time the two gymnasts had more or less landed back on the same page, Obama appeared to be out of touch with American workers fuming at $4 per gallon gas,...

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