At a campaign event on March 18, Mitt Romney repeated a common GOP assertion: President Obama wanted the price of gasoline to go up.
"There's one promise he's kept,” Mr. Romney said at a pancake breakfast in Moline, Ill. “When he campaigned he said he wanted to raise the price of gasoline. He said that under him, energy costs would skyrocket. And then he brought in a trio of people to help him implement those policies.”
Obama, in fact, has never said he wanted higher gas prices, though Energy Secretary Steven Chu once said he thought gas prices should rise to European levels to promote the use and development of alternatives. That was four years ago, when he was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. On March 13, speaking before a Senate committee, Secretary Chu disavowed that view, saying he wants the price of gasoline to go down.
In January 2008, Obama did say in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that his cap-and-trade proposal would cause electricity costs to rise, as noted by NBC News. But he didn’t mention gas prices.
At a press conference on March 6, Obama was asked if he wanted higher gas prices to help wean the US off carbon fuels. Obama laughed.
"Just from a political perspective, do you think the president of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher?” the president said.
Romney says Obama has gone through an “election-year conversion.”
