From the Washington Post:

This brings us to Exhibit B, which is, you may have guessed, Obama. He got the good-policy merit badge for resisting peer pressure (McCain plus Hillary Clinton) for a gas tax holiday. He would spend $150 billion over 10 years, far more than McCain would, to promote alternative sources of energy. So far, so good.

But the Obama campaign has taken a decided turn toward the less responsible in the past week. I'm not talking about his evolution on drilling. However poll-driven, this is eminently sensible: He's not itching for more but willing to consider it in certain areas as part of a broader, bipartisan compromise.

The same can't be said for his deja-vu-all-over-again proposal to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (see Al Gore 2000, John Kerry 2004), or for his $1,000-per-family "energy rebate," a whopping $65 billion cost to be paid for with a windfall-profits tax. Just a month ago, Obama was saying that there was no need to tap the reserve and that such a move should be saved for a "genuine emergency." Oil was more than $140 a barrel then. It's less than $120 a barrel now. What's changed, except for the better? Still, as gimmicks go, tapping the reserve is a more effective one than a gas tax holiday.

As for a windfall-profits tax, if you want to produce more energy, it hardly makes sense to give oil companies less incentive to make investments. Nor does it make sense to tax companies because market conditions boost their profits -- any more than homeowners and shareholders should be penalized for selling during a boom.

Obama, too, has descended to misleading. He accuses McCain of wanting to give $4 billion in tax breaks to oil companies -- without mentioning that this is no special oil-only deal, just part of McCain's proposal for an overall reduction in the corporate tax rate, something Obama has said he'd consider. Does that put him in the pocket of Big Oil, too?

And another question: If this is the state of the discussion in August, what will October bring?