Matthew Rognile asks an excellent question:

There is virtually nothing that American politicians can do to change the price of oil. Mitt Romney talks about the need tokeep “supply” in line with demand, but he neglects to mention that the relevant quantities are world supply and world demand, and that the US has nowhere near enough oil to make a dent in world supply. Although producing more oil would be financially beneficial for the US, this is only for the very simple reason that selling oil earns money, not the tiny impact that higher US production would have on prices faced by consumers. (Norway has probably managed to figure this one out by now.)
At the same time, however, there is an even more important price that politicians around the country can change: the price of housing. Especially in major cities like New York, San Francisco, Washington and (gah!) Boston, a tangle of zoning and building restrictions makes housing far more expensive than the direct costs of supplying it would suggest. Changes in population from state to state are dominated by a general trend of moving to where housing is cheaper. The costs of shelter account for more than 20% of consumer expenditures. Clearly this a very, very important issue for consumers’ well-being—yet we don’t see a popular response that comes close to matching the ferocity of the reaction to gas prices.

As Matthew points out, one reason is that homeowners are overrepresented in the electorate:

Perversely, their incentive is to choke off the housing supply as much as possible, not look into ways to create affordable housing. And now, in a world where higher house prices are (mistakenly or not) viewed as essential to economic recovery, this manipulation even acquires an air of legitimacy.

This is one reason why I’m so keen on eliminating the mortgage interest deduction, among others, and using the resulting revenue increase to “buy” lower marginal tax rates, to create the appearance (and, if we take efficiency gains into account, the reality) of a win-win.

Energy prices prompt a different political response:

With energy prices, on the other hand, there’s an element of politicians creating their own reality. Since energy encounters price spikes so frequently, it’s an obvious target for popular anger, and thus an easy target for political pandering. Even if there’s absolutely nothing they can do on the issue, politicians are forced to say something about it. And since politicians talk about energy prices so much—and those prices become perceived as a legitimate topic of political debate—voters assume that government must be able to have some impact.

This post — lucid, non-obvious — is yet another example of why you should follow Matthew Rognile.