Toward the end of this editorial, we’ll relate what happened this morning when we bought our copy of the Financial Times. Its lead story was about what’s next for the Democrats, now that the Saudis have spurned President Biden’s pleas to pump more oil to help his party in November. Democrats fret about the price of gas yet remain hostile to domestic production. Their next step may be a relic of the 1970s energy crisis — a ban on oil exports.

The FT lays out the logic — if that’s the word — of this scheme. It observes that oil exports are surging and America is “taking on a bigger role as a fuel supplier” to the world, “even as tensions flair” over the cost of gas at home. “Buffeted by high prices,” the FT reports, “the White House has refused to rule out controls on fuel exports.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had warned oil refiners on this head back in August.

At the time, the Biden White House was already in a swivet over high gas prices — the result, in part, of its own policies against domestic oil production and gasoline refineries. Ms. Granholm urged the refiners “to focus in the near term on building inventories” at home in America “rather than selling down current stocks and further increasing exports.” The oil companies were asked to “proactively address this need.” 

If they failed to act, Ms. Granholm threatened, “additional Federal requirements or other emergency measures” would be undertaken. It was the kind of decree that one would imagine being made by, say, Joe Stalin to spur on production during a  five-year plan. As Bloomberg News described it, Secretary Granholm was “asking refiners to prioritize American consumers over maximizing their profits by supplying fuel-starved Europe.”

Mr. Biden’s White House has been trying just about every gimmick it can find to lower gas prices short of the simple solution of boosting domestic production. It has depleted to historic lows the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, once intended as a hedge against severe shortages. It is looking to autocratic regimes to ramp up oil drilling. It is threatening windfall taxes on oil companies. The last resort is reviving the oil export ban.

That ban was imposed in 1975 after OPEC’s manipulation of the world oil market sent prices soaring and when it seemed the great days of American oil production were behind it. Yet the domestic industry mounted a comeback. By the 2010s, the ban had outlived its usefulness and was only kept around because of Democratic opposition to oil drilling. Republicans pushed to lift it in 2015. Exports immediately surged as did Democrats’ hostility to oil.

It’s gotten to the point where the Saudis have to give America advice on how to get itself out of this mess. At an international parley at Riyadh, the Wall Street Journal reports, Saudi officials delivered “a message” for America: “Do more to solve energy problems on your own.” Along with other eco-focused Western governments, the Saudis said, America “hasn’t invested enough in fossil-fuel production” to avoid an energy crisis.

Which brings us back to that Financial Times story. It happens that we got the FT at a village store in the wilderness of northern New England, where we took a copy of the paper off the rack and got in line. The fellow ahead of us — a friendly all-American working man, to judge by his scuffed boots and jeans — glanced at the FT and, back of the hand, slapped the lead headline and shook his head. “Biden just gets it backwards everytime,” we said.

The fellow apparently shared our view, for when we reached the cash register, we discovered that he’d paid for our paper. Merely anecdotal, one might say, except that there’s a long line of anecdotes suggesting that Americans are smarter than the politicians. Or, as Lincoln put it, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Not even in Joe Biden’s America.