From Jonah Goldberg, who has been to both:

This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.

Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.

[Afternoon update]

McCain’s attitude: Let them eat honor:

At a town-hall meeting in Philadelphia, McCain said he could no sooner drill in ANWR than in the Grand Canyon. This is like comparing a roadside flea market to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Five million people a year visit the Grand Canyon, whereas 1,000 visit ANWR. Why would anyone want to go? It’s a frozen wasteland during the winter and a mosquito-infested bog during the summer.

McCain opposes drilling off the shores of Florida and California as well, saying that the states should be able to decide. But Alaska desperately wants to drill in ANWR. Its opinion apparently doesn’t count. In an interview on the Today show, McCain ridiculously held out the prospect that advances in alternative energy might lower the price of gas by November. He’s touting fanciful revolutionary breakthroughs within months without acknowledging the real technological advances that make it possible to drill with minimal environmental impact.

He’s blowing a huge political opportunity.

You’re probably shocked. I know I was:

I’m guessing the profit isn’t 51 cents. But whatever it is, it’s too much! I’ve heard some people yearn for a windfall profits tax that would reinvest the money in alternative energy, or rebate it back to the consumer. Fine. Apply that to your business. Here’s the acceptable profit level. You don’t get to make any more than that. If you do, the state will confiscate the property and divide it among your competitors, or give it back to your customers. Have a nice day. But oil is different. It’s necessary! So is food. Farmers are doing well. Let us therefore set the acceptable level for corn farmers, take away the excess profits, invest it new forms of sweeteners or biofuels farmers cannot yet produce, and give people rebates for Splenda to compensate for the price of high fructose corn syrup.

It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not. We should not drill 50 miles off shore on the chance someone in Malibu takes a hot-air balloon up 1000 feet and uses a telephoto lens to scan the horizon for oil platforms. Also, there are ecological concerns. (The ocean is a wee place, easily disturbed.) There’s something else that may well be my imagination, but I can’t quite shake the feeling: high gas prices and shortages of oil make some people feel good. This is the way it has to be. Oil is bad. Cars are bad. Cars make suburbs possible. Suburbs are the antithesis of the way we should live, which is stacked upon one another in dense blocks tied together by happy whirring trains. So some guy who drives to work alone has to spend more money for the privilege of being alone in his car listening to hate radio?

Good.

John McCain continues to justly call for Obama to visit Iraq, and talk to General Petraeus (without preconditions). Well, I think that if Senator McCain would visit ANWR, he might discover that it is nothing at all like the Grand Canyon. Of course, Obama is not in a position to call him on that, since he opposes drilling there (and everywhere else, as far as I can tell) as well.

[Update a minute or two later]

Here’s a great suggestion:

Another way McCain can move toward an ANWR solution is to educate himself on small-footprint drilling practices. He should talk to some oil company guys, get the facts, and then announce STERNLY that he will only support the exploration in ANWR if it strictly adheres to “environmentally friendly low-impact micro-drilling standards” and DEMAND that no more than .5% of the land in that area be compromised in even the slightest way.

Bingo. The oil companies can all drill within those parameters now and McCain can appear as the reasonable tough guy he wants to be.

Unfortunately, I think he’s too stubborn and fixed in his views to do such a thing.

I’m kind of scratching my head here. Can an Obama supporter explain to me how he can accept the resignation of someone who doesn’t work for him? Maybe it’s just more of that change you can believe in…

Actually, it would be pretty amusing if someone in the press asked him that question. Don’t hold your breath, though.

LGF has the story.

The man’s good at giving speeches, but he doesn’t seem to be able to identify or hire good staff. Do we really even want him picking cabinet members, let alone running the country?

Victor Davis Hanson has thoughts on the wrong reasons to support Obama:

Aside from the obvious point that we should not pick our presidents on the basis of whether those in mostly autocratic, non-democratic societies approve, there is something very tribal and racialist about all this chauvinism.

If a white male Christian of European ancestry were suddenly a likely successor to the Mubarak dictatorship, or were next in line to take over the Mugabe kleptocracy, or were stealing Venezuela from Hugo Chavez, or were going to be elected the next leader of South Africa, it would be of less than zero importance to me, and I would hope to other Americans of similar backgrounds. And I think most of us would shudder should an Englishman or Australian say “I just hope your next President is another white male Christian like McCain.” I was in Greece in 1988 when the socialist liberal Greeks went ga-ga over Mike Dukakis solely on the basis on his shared ethnic background and it seemed pretty absurd, especially when many promised they would change their dark view of Reagan’s America if a Greek-American were elected President.

So, one, I don’t see what is so great when a foreigner tells an American journalist that his view of America might change should we elect a person closer to his own perceived racial or religious self-image. Seems instead illiberal, tribal, and retrograde. And two, if Egyptians, Iranians, Congolese, or Bolivians want real changes in their own lives, then they should look to their own autocratic systems, not the United States that can do little to alleviate their mostly self-inflicted miseries other than to continue to shell out hundreds of billions in petrodollars and ever more humanitarian aid.

It’s all about the identity politics. You know, that “new politics” we’ve been hearing so much about.