When President Obama was three days in office, then-House Minority Whip Eric Cantor offered the president ideas for economic stimulus. America was mired in an ongoing recession marked by high unemployment. Cantor’s ideas – not surprisingly – included tax cuts for small businesses.

According to various news reports at the time, the president told Cantor, “We disagree on tax policy.”

Cantor attempted to justify his position. President Obama cut him off: “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”

President Obama was never more correct. Elections do have consequences, and today the American people are suffering for their votes.

When I drove past the gas station this morning, gas was priced at $3.79 a gallon for regular.

Obama’s solution to the price of gas, when questioned at a recent town hall meeting, was to tell a man he needed to trade in his car.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said. The man responded that he has 10 kids. “Well, you definitely need a hybrid van, then,” the president responded.

Who is getting 8 miles to the gallon? The Cadillac Escalade with its huge body and V8 engine is getting 14 mpg in city travel; the Suburban gets 15 mpg. The fact is, a guy with 10 kids isn’t likely to get anywhere near 8 mpg. Most minivans are getting city mpg in the high teens. Unless this father of 10 is strapping nine of his kids to the roof of his Lamborghini, it’s highly doubtful he’s getting sub-10 mpg.

So, the president exaggerated gas mileage to make his point. No big deal.

But to prove that his entire “green industry” initiative is little more than fantasy, President Obama recommended the man buy a hybrid van.

The trouble is, there are no hybrid vans being sold in the United States. No one, not even the president’s own auto manufacturing company, General Motors, is making a hybrid van for sale in the United States.

But it doesn’t matter.

Elections have consequences, and we’re reaping the results.

Prior to taking office, President Obama made it clear that he is in favor of higher energy prices, because Americans using less energy fits his world view.

I’m going to say it again for emphasis.

Americans using less energy fits President Obama’s world view.

And he told us this in January of 2008, before he was elected president on a platform of “hope and change.”

Candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

Holy higher energy prices, Batman!

From the days of his candidacy, Obama has made it clear that his “green energy” policies will mean higher energy prices for people in the U.S. because in his world view, energy consumption is one of the things that separates the United States from other countries.

And I would argue that it has nothing to do with the so-called Anthropologic Global Warming myth. He’s not trying to save the world from man-made catastrophe.

Obama, and those like him, are simply anti-capitalists. Call them socialists or communists or whatever you like, but they are people who view the world in terms of those who have wealth and those who do not have wealth. And his goal is to level the playing field between those who have it and those who do not by removing the opportunities for gaining wealth.

The principles of economic freedom that built our country and made it different from and better than other nations are what President Obama and those like him despise.

And where, if not in the consumption of energy, is economic freedom more visible? Where can you find the evidence of wealth more readily than in vehicles with big fuel consumption? Which cars have the worst gas mileage? The ones that cost more money than most people make in a year. The Lambos, the Bentleys, the Ferraris.

It’s not about “renewable energy” for Obama, and it never was.

But he couldn’t get cap-and-trade because the American people made it clear they didn’t care for their electric bills to “skyrocket.”

So he’s backdooring his energy policies through the regulatory authority of the alphabet soups and his own authority for issuing executive orders.

Drilling bans, regulations, revoked permits, a moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf – these are the hallmarks of President Obama’s energy policy, not approved by Congress, but rammed through the back door through his executive powers.

Experts are talking about $5 a gallon gas this summer, and the United States is feeling the truth of President Obama’s proclamation: “Elections have consequences.”

Rob Peecher is a reporter for The Oconee Leader. He can be reached at 706-310-1104 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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