The vice president, during a speech last week before the meeting of the Associated Press in Toronto, signaled some of his thinking. The vice president knows a lot about oil and energy. He was the chairman of Halliburton, the Texas-based energy services firm, during the past five years. And that explains in part why he was so roundly criticized by environmentalists. That is not an extraordinary stance.
Few experts say conservation alone is going to do the job.
But as Susan Page of USA Today said on Late Edition Sunday, the tone of Cheney's remarks about conservation almost seemed condescending. Energy and energy prices could turn out to be a huge political issue in Washington. The White House knows that. Several top officials have made it clear to me in recent weeks that if the American public comes to associate high energy prices with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their aides, they could be in trouble. So far at least, the president does not appear to have had much success with OPEC, either.