Putting herself in stark contrast to Obama’s “prices will necessarily skyrocket” proposal – from The Hill:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) vowed Tuesday that, in her presidency, gasoline prices would fall back to less than $2 per gallon.

Bachmann, speaking to a town-hall meeting in South Carolina, said she would pursue energy policies that send pump prices down to levels not seen since early 2009, at the thick of the U.S. recession.

“Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 per gallon again,” she said in Greenville. “That will happen.”…

The thing is, the trick can be done – and done rather easily.  All it takes is “drill, baby, drill” and a bit of extra effort in building refineries.  Just the announcement that we were abandoning Obama’s “permatorium” on offshore drilling would probably drop a barrel of oil by 10 or 20%.  Add to that the knowledge that the EPA would not try to regulate out of existence such promising new technology as “fracking”, and we could see a barrel of oil going for half or less what it is today by the end of a Bachmann first term…and that would go a long way towards lowing the price of gasoline to the $2 a gallon range.

The United States cannot become oil-independent.  We just use too much of it – but given what we know is there and with the existing and developing technology we have, we can certainly reduce our demand for foreign oil by quite a lot.  My guess is by about half (so we’d be importing about a third of our oil needs).  That kind of a slackening of demand on the global market will, in turn, drop oil prices everywhere.  It works out, in the end, to a gigantic tax cut on wealth creation…not only in the direct savings on energy costs, but on the follow-on effects of people having more money to spend on things besides energy.

If we couple such a flat-out development of our oil resources with further development of “clean coal”, nuclear and other alternative energy sources, we can get past the “oil chasm” in our economic history…reaching for a time when our overall demand for oil starts to drop year by year as new energy supplies come on line.  The additional benefit – and it is massive – is that the fewer dollars we’re sending overseas for oil means less wealth for our enemies to use against us.

This is a gigantic and easily understood advantage for the United States and whole world.  Naturally, Obama and his liberals are opposed to it – perversely, because they feel the United States needs to be punished for being so wealthy, powerful and free.  Carrying such a positive, American message is just what we need to do in 2012…as Obama keeps talking about wind and solar, we’ll be talking about what people know, and what can work today.  The rest of the GOP field can do no better than to follow Bachmann’s lead…and if it irks them to have to do so, then the suggestion is to come up with something equally bold to restore American prosperity and greatness.