While the Bush administration's energy policy will take time to fully assess, reaction of the political opposition provides an inverse gauge of its merits.
By that measure, the Bush plan looks very good. The opposition has had little sensible to say against it.
House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) took his best shot by holding up a copy of the 163-page report and saying it looked like "the ExxonMobil annual report."
Gosh, that's dumb.
To be literal about it, anyone who has seen the ExxonMobil annual report knows that the resemblance is weak.
But, of course, Gephardt was just taking a cheap shot at Bush's past affiliation with the oil industry, trafficking in the populist assertion that someone with an oil industry background can't legitimately set energy policy.
It's time to skewer that nonsense. The current energy crunch stems largely from the regulatory and legislative mistakes of officials who know dreadfully little about energy. What the US needs most is energy policy set by people who know something about the subject for a change.
Democrats from Missouri don't think that way.
"A short-term solution would be to have the federal government respond to charges of price-gouging," Gephardt observed.
Rubbish. The ink's hardly dry on the last investigation, which, like all its predecessors, found no evidence of price-gouging where gasoline is concerned. The Federal Trade Commission made its report in February. Maybe Gephardt missed it.
Logic check: The government responded to charges of price-gouging with an investigation of price-gouging, which found no price-gouging. And prices didn't fall.
So much for Gephardt's ideas about short-term solutions.
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) was no more insightful than Gephardt.
"This is not a plan for America's future," said Daschle, who joined other Democrats last week in calling for yet another investigation into gasoline pricing. "It is a page from our past. It is a plan for drilling more oil wells, burning more coal, and using more natural gas."
Now there's a stinging indictment. So while Gephardt duplicates futile investigations into price gouging, Daschle will be trying to keep the country from responding to a supply problem by encouraging supply.
Daschle also faulted Bush for proposing, in the budget for fiscal 2002, to cut federal spending on energy conservation.
He thus pounded on one of the two main complaints with which Democrats awaited the energy program: that it wouldn't call on the federal government to do something about elevated energy prices or mandate conservation.
There, the Democrats are fundamentally wrong. Price controls and conservation can't happen at the same time. History is clear about this. A government eager for conservation must keep its hands off prices.
In response to the Bush plan, the best that congressional Democrats can come up with are vague calls for reimposition of long-discredited market controls and Gephardt's cute but pointless annual report analogy.
By contrast, and if for no other reason than that it avoids mistakes of the past, the Bush plan looks masterful. But it's really just a comprehensive statement of what the US should have been doing all along.