(CNSNews.com) - MoveOn.org, the liberal grassroots group, has unveiled a television ad campaign on energy that is an attack on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and his support for offshore drilling.
 
But free-market critics say the ad reflects more about MoveOn’s ignorance of economics than it does politics.
 
The ad features an older “ordinary Joe,” sitting in a chair, facing the camera, talking about how he used to trust McCain.
 
“Our energy crisis is causing Americans real pain,” the ad’s tag line says. “But instead of solutions, John McCain is offering gimmicks. Americans deserve better.”
 
Ira Pariser, executive director of MoveOn.org Action, said the ad will be aimed at voters in some key states, though those states have “not been determined yet.” He said the ad reflects the views of his membership that McCain’s support for offshore drilling is wrong-headed.
 
“Our members know that gas prices are not going to be going down in the long run – in the long run the trajectory is up – so we need real solutions that will allow Americans cheap and clean energy to power our future,” Pariser said.
 
“That also means we need to call out gimmicks like offshore drilling that do nothing to move us toward that clean energy future,” he said.

Cathy Duvall, political director for the Sierra Club, which is co-sponsoring the ad, said expanded drilling is a “no-no.” But she also said environmental groups are “incensed” that major oil companies like ExxonMobil are making “obscene” profits while “most people are having difficulty” in paying out-of-control prices at the pump.
 
“As gas prices have skyrocketed, so have oil profits,” Duvall said, reeling off a list for reporters at a telephone news conference Thursday.
 
“Just this week, Big Oil companies -- BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, are reporting yet another quarter of billions in record-breaking profits – actually outstripping even last year’s record profits,” she said.
 
“ConocoPhillips netted $5.4 billion, BP pulled in $9.5 billion and today ExxonMobil and Shell announced profits of $11.68 billion and $11.6 respectively. To put that into perspective, that is about $800 in profit over the course of a year for every driver in America,” Duvall added.
 
Sierra Club and MoveOn are pushing people to support Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the purported Democratic nominee, Duvall said.
 
“Sen. Obama will take on the oil companies, and end the choke-hold they have on our economy and on our politics,” she said. “Sen. McCain’s plan is just more of the same. He’s proposing measures that will continue these obscene profits by the oil companies that we see today, and do very little to help average Americans.”
 
McCain’s campaign would not comment on the ad or the charge, but Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, fired back.
 
“A day after Barack Obama told voters to inflate their tires and reject domestic exploration, his special-interest friends are echoing his anti-drilling message on TV,” Conant told CNSNews.com.
 
“Attacking John McCain’s solutions to America’s energy crisis and offering nothing but tire-maintenance advice will not reduce prices at the pump,” said Conant. “Special-interest groups that oppose America maximizing its own natural resources hope Obama wins, but voters who want lower gas prices will support McCain.”
 
Conant was referring to Obama’s speech Wednesday in Springfield, Mo., in which he said: “There are things that you can do individually though to save energy; making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing(s), but we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much.”
 
Calls to the Obama campaign were not answered.
 
But free-market economists such as Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, meanwhile, said that, apart from the political considerations, MoveOn and the Sierra Club do not have a good grasp of economics if they think Big Oil’s profits are “obscene.”
 
“Profit is a sign that a company is doing something right,” Ebell said “It’s using its resources effectively, and its shareholders are getting value out of their investment.”
 
Unfortunately, banning so-called “windfall profits,” Ebell said, is not only the chant of MoveOn, it has become the chant of congressional Democrats.
 
“There has been a continual drum beat from (House) Speaker (Nancy) Pelosi and (Senate) Majority Leader (Harry) Reid, and there has been vote after vote to put a windfall profits tax on these companies, or to take away the tax cuts that were given a few years ago to corporations,” he said.
 
Ebell said there are few ideas that are more nonsensical.
 
“It would make as much sense to punish people who haven’t invested in the oil companies,” he told CNSNews.com. “The people who have invested in the oil companies are making it possible for us to get gasoline when we go to the service station. People may say prices are too high, but if more people had invested in oil companies, then there would be more investment in new fields and new refineries and new pipelines, and prices would be lower.”
 
The MoveOn.org ad will begin to air soon in selected markets.