[JurisDictum]

Remember when high gas prices were “Obama’s fault?”
...
Mitt Romney said “the doubling of gasoline prices obviously follows a presidential policy.” He said Obama deserves blame “for what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch.”

The Republican National Committee blamed the high pump prices on “the Obama economy.”

Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming said that Obama should be held “fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline.”

Paul Ryan, the veep candidate, said that Obama was going “to great lengths to make gas more expensive.”

Rick Santorum said that Obama and his liberal wonks caused the pump price to rise because “they want higher energy prices. They want to push their radical agenda on the public.”

And so on. They basically argued that Obama, his environmentalist allies, and his energy advisers were conspiring, via socialist engineering, to make gas so expensive that motorists would drive less. Supposedly, Obama was jonesing for $10 gas so that we would be “more like Europe” – and that the price spike in 2012 was just his opening act.

Gee. How come they’re not admitting, three years later, that they were dead wrong?

I’m not saying that Obama deserves major credit for the currently falling pump price. The truth, as any graduate of Economics 101 well knows, is that presidents are largely bystanders. The pump price is tied to oil prices on the world market, and those oil prices fluctuate according to supply and demand. Lately, we’ve seen a big spike in supply (including a rebound of drilling in Libya and a shale-oil boom in America), coupled with dampened global demand (economic slowdowns in Europe and China). The result, in America, is that the average gallon is now nearly a buck less than a year ago.

Sometimes old news can inform us about the present. As the saying goes: "Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."