Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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A gas station in Menlo Park, California.

Few issues on the campaign trail have been more obscured by demagoguery than the recent spike in gas prices.

To hear John Kerry tell it this week, you're paying more at the gas pump today because George W. Bush keeps adding to the nation's strategic petroleum reserve.

Wrong, says Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst specializing in energy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He says that Kerry's proposal to stop adding to the strategic petroleum reserve would have a "negligible impact.... The point is just to jab at the administration."

"In terms of the strategic petroleum reserve, I don't even think anyone would be talking about this if this wasn't an election year," he tells NRO. "We're not talking about that much oil. Obviously oil prices are set by global supply and demand, and the global demand is about 80 million barrels per day."

The Bush administration's current policy is to fill the SPR at a rate of 300,000 barrels per day, or .00375 percent of the global oil supplies. The administration asked the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration to examine whether restocking the SPR was affecting prices.

Energy Dept. spokeswoman Jeanne Lopato says the EIA concluded the price effect was "close to zero."

Kerry's second attack on Bush has been that he hasn't "jawboned" the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

"Where is the call for OPEC to start producing?" Kerry asked during a campaign appearance in Oregon Tuesday. "Where's the president who, when he was campaigning for president, said in New Hampshire what we need is a president who jawbones OPEC to lower those gas prices? Well, I haven't seen any jawboning, have you?"

Jerry Taylor, the Cato Institute's director of natural-resource studies, ridicules Kerry's plan to jawbone OPEC as "silly.... That's like making a big deal about your willingness to argue with the woman at the checkout counter at the supermarket, or at the guy behind the counter at McDonald's."

"OPEC's been doing what they've been doing with success under Democratic administrations and under Republican administrations," Lieberman says. "To the extent they were charging cheaper prices in the 1990s, it was due to weaker demand. Recessions in places like Asia had the benefit of reducing demand in commodities. Right now there are no major recessions in any major oil consuming country, and in China, demand is increasing."

Taylor adds, Bush asked for this criticism when he made similar unrealistic arguments about influencing OPEC as a candidate in 2000.

The experts conclude that President Bush wasn't that much more accurate Wednesday when he shot back at Kerry that, "If people had acted on my energy bill when I submitted it three years ago, we would be in a much better situation today." There's little in the bill — at least the versions likely to come out of the House and Senate — that would have immediate impact on gas prices, and the legislation's ethanol mandates would result in higher costs for producers. (This is probably why the National Corn Growers Association this week urged President George W. Bush not to dip into the reserve and instead enact comprehensive energy policy containing a renewable fuels standard.)

"Both parties trying to use higher gas prices for agendas that have been sitting on the shelf for a while and that they've had a hard time getting adopted," Taylor says.

Media coverage of the increase in prices appears to be exaggerates the effect on most Americans. For hype-antidote, Taylor points to Alan Sloans's column in the Washington Post's business section Wednesday.

"Gas prices averaged $1.94 a gallon at the pump last week, according to the Department of Energy, up 45 cents from a year ago," Sloan wrote. "The average vehicle uses 550 gallons of gas annually. Do the math, and at $1.94, it costs around $1,070 a year to fuel an average vehicle, up from $820. The difference: less than $25 a month. Almost a rounding error in the overall cost of owning a car, which Edmunds.com, an auto website, puts at $725 a month (not counting fuel) for the first five years. Forgo the Big Gulp, hot dog and chips that you buy along with your fill-up, and you'll be ahead of the game."

Taylor says he doubts gas prices will be the deciding factor for many voters, compared to other big issues like Iraq, the economy, health care, and jobs.

Lieberman thinks the issue's political impact will be clear long before Election Day. "To the extent this does political damage, it's already doing the damage, and it may be too late to change things by the summer. It's tough for refiners to barely produce enough to meet demand for the summertime months. There could be relief in September, but after a good six months of high prices, the hits would already have been taken."