The McCain campaign is lagging behind the Obama campaign in national opinion polls in many subjects, most recently polls that show the American public believes Obama is better prepared to deal with the energy crisis than Senator McCain. So, like the good little neo-con he has spent the last eight years becoming, Senator McCain has resorted to making bombastic, misleading claims.

In his latest campaign commercial he has basically said that Barack Obama is the reason for high gas prices:

Now, as I am an independent, I don’t have a horse in this race (although I will not be voting for McCain, that’s for sure). However, I hate negative political tactics and more importantly, I hate it when politicians lie to the American public in an attempt to stir up fervor for their own campaign. And while McCain may be right that Obama doesn’t support offshore drilling (or drilling in the ANWR, which McCain also opposes), but to claim that Obama’s stance on off-shore drilling on the continental shelf equates to high gas prices is ludicrous.

Point of fact, Senator Obama has proposed over $150 billion in spending over 10 years for the development of bio-fuels, plug-in hybrids, low-emission ["clean"] coal plants and the rapid development of other new, clean energy technologies (including nuclear power, as long as it’s “safe”). Factcheck.org did a nice little examination of an RNC ad about Senator Obama’s energy policy a few weeks back that applies well to this commercial as well.

This is an important issue in the upcoming election, and a recent conversation that I had with my father really got me thinking about the way the campaigns are handling the truth. In today’s society people are overly influenced by 30-60 second snippets of often misleading information, especially when it comes to politics. Only a small percentage of voters actually take the time to get accurate information and make educated decisions, and that is the biggest problem we face at this time, uneducated voters casting votes based on lies, spin and emotion rather than fact and logic.

The real question we should all be asking ourselves is what we can do to change this? How do we educate a society that is more interested in Britney Spear’s life than in the future of their government? I wish I had the answer to that question, I think we’d all be better off if people actually knew what they were voting for instead of picking their favorite tv commercial for President. Sasquatch in ‘08.