No matter how much President Obama protests, the simple fact is that he continues to oppose and mock and disparage oil and gas drilling. He is a prisoner of the environmental left, and he remains on the wrong side of energy history.

And that’s exactly why he has a 59 percent negative rating on the economy, according to a recent poll, even though jobs and other indicators have actually picked up. It’s about $4 or higher gas at the pump. Polls overwhelmingly show that Americans want drilling in ANWR and offshore, and that they want hydraulic fracturing of shale for oil and gas. They also overwhelmingly want the Keystone Pipeline (by roughly 70 percent). And they believe the government can act quickly to lower gas prices in the short run.