Politicians are mostly stupid, and they are mostly slimy. And there is no better example of this than the current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

The belief of a lot of pundits both on the left and the right is that the Democrats can take the White House and increase their Congressional numbers due to the downturn in the economy that was caused by the credit crises. The economy is the number one issue that many Americans are looking at this election year when they cast their votes, as so many have in fact forgotten that we are fighting a war on terror. When things are going well, we don’t think about them, which is why there is little news coming from Iraq. Other pundits have theorized that the bad economy is a good thing for Democrats because Americans blame most of their problems on the President and his party. Some have even claimed that the Democrats are getting in the way of economic relief so that more blame will be assigned to the President and to Republicans.

Well, it seems that something started happening recently that hasn’t happened in a very long time. The Republicans in Congress starting acting like leaders. I know what you are thinking. “This can’t be happening. If only they had done this years ago.” Anyways, nearly 100 Republican members of Congress have gone back to Washington to demand a vote on the energy bill, a bill that is opposed by Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi decided that with gas prices sitting at four bucks a gallon, it was a good time to take a five week vacation. So Republicans decided to stay at the office and discuss the issue and continue to demand that Pelosi call Congress back for a vote. They have been giving speeches and have been personally escorting people into the chambers. They are doing all of this without microphones or cameras because Pelosi had everything shut off.

Before the protests had ever begun, Republicans starting making public the fact that opposition from Democrats is largely responsible for the high price of oil. This is in fact a supply and demand issue and has little to do with speculators. And it appears that the American people are starting to catch on to this. According to Rasmussen Reports, voters trust McCain on energy issues over Obama by a 46% to 42% margin. Only 33% of American voters believe Al Gore’s proposal to switch all of the nation’s electricity production to wind, solar and other carbon-free sources in 10 years is realistic. And more than two-thirds of voters want to allow offshore drilling.

These polls aren’t being ignored completely by Congress. It seems that Nancy Pelosi is secretly encouraging at risk Democrats to express their independence if it helps them politically. She may be stupid, but she is also slimy, and she wants to take more seats this year, instead of losing them over this issue. She is encouraging this despite her well publicized opposition. She swears up and down that drilling won’t help, but she thinks that releasing the oil reserves will help. Please note that she is talking about 3 days supply.

Obama appears to be reading the poll numbers too and recently said he could support off-shore drilling. He said this despite his recent opposition and his current ads attacking John McCain over energy issues.

Can the Republicans in fact have a large victory this year over the Democrats opposition to drilling? If you add this to the fact that a majority now see us winning the war on terror, you start to have an affect on the voters that could swing things towards the right. History tells us that the American voters will blame their woes on the Republican party because of President Bush. But Republicans have a chance here to show who is really causing the problems in this country if they market this issue properly.

I guess we will see this November.

This video shows Nancy Pelosi unable to answer simple questions regarding the vote.