As an issue, it simply doesn't lend itself to the usual exploitation.

Maybe this is why Rep. Dan Burton (R- Ind.), who's rarely put off by a cheap shot, has scheduled hearings of his committee to try to milk some mileage out of it.

Normally, the party incumbent in the White House would be the natural goat.

The recent spike in oil prices and the threat of a winter heating-oil crisis happened on the Democrats' watch.

But if it were that simple we surely would have heard more on this subject by now from George W. Bush.

This makes it all the more incomprehensible that the Republicans decided this year to nominate not one but two oil men and not one but two Texans.

One of them, Dick Cheney, got rich servicing oil companies and would have gotten even richer if he hadn't been embarrassed into shedding those options in Halliburton Co. shares that gave him a personal financial reason to pray for higher oil prices.

The other, George W. Bush, had much the opposite experience. He almost got ruined by low oil prices and was able to build a small fortune only by deftly bailing out on his investors and switching from the oil business to the sports business.

If oil prices had risen to 2000 levels right after Bush got seriously into the oil business in the early 1980s, the chances are he'd still be happily pumping the stuff. What a blissful life for a man now having fits trying to pronounce hard words, remember names of foreign leaders and maintain a facial expression that does not suggest he's about to call someone a vulgar name that will have to be deleted from family newspapers.

What happened was that after 1982 oil prices started declining. All the money Bush had called in from family friends to dig holes in the surface of Texas was yielding negative returns.

By 1986, the average world price of oil was a lousy $12.51 a barrel, down from $28.52 in 1982. That's why in 1986, Bush described himself as "all name and no money." And the investors who had generously financed him probably had an even less generous description of their golden boy and his expensive holes, maybe even a name with "hole" in it.

So voters are stuck with two Republican candidates who can't very well call for lower oil prices with a straight face because they spent earlier careers praying for higher ones. All they can do is suggest that Al Gore is the real candidate of big oil because he inherited Occidental Petroleum shares from his father and had sense enough to stuff them in a blind trust.

Bush, of course, faults the Clinton administration because it hasn't opened up sensitive wilderness areas to extensive exploration. Of course, if the government had done this back when Bush was in the oil business, he'd have lost his shirt even quicker.

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