"Yes We Can," Mr President

You remember the good old days.  When Candidate Obama campaigned around the country exclaiming: "Yes We Can!"

But now he's running around whining that no, we can't.  The late Steve Jobs complained about this to Walter Isaacson, his biographer.  Remember the dinner that Obama had with Silicon Valley tech titans?  It didn't go very well.

According to his biography, when Jobs organized a dinner of Internet executives with Mr. Obama, he concluded, "The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done." He added, "It infuriates me."

Golly, who would have thought it?  Here's another meeting Jobs had with the president.

In Jobs’s meeting with Obama, held at the Westin San Francisco Airport in the fall of 2010, he told the president that setting up factories in China was easier than in the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult. Jobs also criticized the American education system, calling it “crippled by union work rules.”

 Gosh!  Obama's America is a place where "No, we can't."  What went wrong?

Now we have the president's ill-considered No We Can't Have $2.50 a Gallon Gasoline remarks.  Newt Gingrich has suggested that if we pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy we can get to $2.50 a gallon gasoline, down from its present $4.00 per gallon.

No we can't, said the president in his weekly radio address.

But you and I both know that with only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices – not when consume 20 percent of the world’s oil. We need an all-of-the-above strategy that relies less on foreign oil and more on American-made energy – solar, wind, natural gas, biofuels, and more.

Lots of people on the left jumped in and agreed with the president, people like Ezra Klein. But others have pointed out that the president just doesn't understand how markets work.  Markets anticipate the future, so if the president really implemented an all-of-the-above policy with regard to fossil fuels and allowed more drilling on federal lands, allowed drilling offshore, okayed the Keystone pipeline, kept the EPA out of gasoline formulations, etc., you would see a change in gasoline prices.  A lot bigger than anyone would think.

But of course liberals don't want that kind of energy policy.  That is why they all jump in and say it is impossible.  They believe in Peak Oil, in global warming, in CO2 as a pollutant, in getting out of cars and into mass transit, in future technologies like wind and solar, and on and on.  The last thing they want is low gasoline prices, except in the two months before a presidential election when gas prices are hovering around $4.00 per gallon and Americans are hollering for relief.

But we have a different idea.  Yes we can, Mr. President.  Because Big Government is all about Can't.  And Americans are all about Can Do.