Tapping SPR major issue in US election

It is economy stupid again and again and every time there are politicians and elections.
This year is no exception. The rating race between President Barack Obama and his Republican competitor Mitt Romney is running neck to neck. The deciding factor will be economy. With an all-time high unemployment rate of 8 percent, possibilities of economic growth either flattening or may go drop another 2 percent as has been the forecast, but more seriously the consumers' confidence showed a steep decline in July when it registered its biggest drop in ten months this year.
This is alarming, especially if it is an election year. Economy will be the soft belly easy to attack and score some points against opponents. The question becomes what to do and the easy answer is why not tap the strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), where a quick relief could be secured, it is a decision within the jurisdiction of the administration to take and most important, people can see that the administration is moving to do something for their sake.
After all this is not the first time the SPR has been tapped for such political ends and some credible, non-partisan justifications could be spelled out.
More than 12 years another democratic president, Bill Clinton, did the same thing in an election year to help his then Vice President Al Gore, who was going into a tough race with George Bush and gasoline prices were getting into the troubled area keeping unrelenting march upward.
It is Clinton who coined the term: It is economy stupid that won him elections again for George Bush Sr., who helped restoring America's sense of military victory with the backing of the international community to liberate Kuwait. But to the US electorate what counts is what affects their pockets, not complicated foreign policy issues.
It was last year that got Obama into the mood of making use of the SPR. Under the pretext of the Arab Spring impact on the global economy bearing in mind the potential interruption of supplies from places like Libya, which was undergoing a radical change of guard.
A 30 million barrels release from the SPR would help keep the budding growth of the world economy flourishing, so the logic went on. But as expected it was a temporary, short-lived decline of gasoline prices despite the agreement and coordination with the International Energy Agency (IEA), the watchdog advising the leading 27 consumer countries.
With gasoline prices now leveling somewhere around $ 3.75, and more worrying that they jumped around 40 percent in a matter of few months, the red flag is hoisted and something needs to be done. Additional reasons could be found in the complicated world politics. Now that the European Union started to impose its sanctions on Iran, an explosion of a Venezuelan oil refinery, the growing possibility of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and add to this the potential impact of the hurricane season in the United States. Already hurricane Isaac, though it did not make any permanent loss impact, it has managed to close down refineries last week, thus shutting off some 6.7 percent of the US production and help add to the tightening of the market.
The irony in all this is that SPR has been conceived and built to reach currently around 727 million barrel to serve a concrete target that is to be deployed in case of severe energy supply interruption be it domestic or international. And that is how IEA gets in to coordinate with other consumers. Moreover, such interruption should last for a significant amount of time to make the move worthwhile.
Using SPR to defuse a price increase problem was not at any point one of the goals. One obvious explanation is that because such arrangement did not work in the past and will not work in the future. Simply put, it challenges the basic fundamentals of supply and demand.
Ironically enough it was the resort of the Arab producers back in 1973 to use oil as a weapon to press their demands and rights against Israeli occupation of Arab lands. The move led to some political change, but it drew all sorts of criticism - how come Arabs link the economy to further political means.
The moves taking place on the American scene are not only using oil to further political ends, but also to be more specific to further personal or party interests at best. And for that purpose it may be enough for the electorates to see that something is being done regardless of the fact that the end result will be temporary and its impact insignificant. Past experience shows that such an impact does not exceed a couple of weeks and may result in a 2 percent drop in prices only before they head up again.
But who believes that politicians want permanent solutions?