According to the Associated Press (AP) Republican Tea Party (GOTP) presidential candidate Newton Leroy Gingrich is pulling a page from former candidate Michele Bachmann’s playbook claiming he’ll make gas prices drop to as low as $2 a gallon if he’s elected.

The promises were flowing deep as Gingrich campaigned in Oklahoma hoping to capitalize on the latest GOTP fear and gloom tactic that gas prices will rise sharply this summer and Newton is pushing if he’s elected he’ll enact relaxed regulation on domestic oil production which will cause the gas to flow like water.

What the Newtser isn’t saying is that Presidents have extremely limited, if indeed any, power to affect prices of a global commodity like oil. Why does the most powerful man in the world have such limited influence? Because such costs depend largely on supply and demand, hence as the country’s economy improves, demand could rise, putting extra pressure on prices.

Gingrich’s been playing the oil exploration card hard as he tries to resurrect a dead campaign slamming the President for delaying a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline even though the building of the pipeline wouldn’t affect one single penny of the short-term gas prices; Gingrich however is not one to play on reality, and claiming the President is hurting the oil and gas industry plays well in states like Oklahoma which depend heavily on those industries.

“With Gingrich policies, what we know is we will dramatically expand our independence in the world market, dramatically expand our capacity to produce energy without regard to our foreign potential enemies and in the process prices will clearly be a lot lower,” Gingrich said. “Now, I picked $2.50 as a stabilizing price for capital investment reasons. It could easily go down to $2.”

Newt waxed nostalgic, boasting that gas cost was as little as $1.13 per gallon when he led the House and that the national average was below $2 when President Obama was inaugurated.

Newt’s memory is a little off, the average cost of gas when he was speaker ranged from $1.41in 1995 to $1.34 in 1999, but if President Obama’s responsible for rising gas prices now, then wasn’t President Clinton responsible for lower prices then, and not the Speaker of the House? How exactly would the Speaker affect gas prices anyhow? What Newt failed to mention during his litany of Obama bashing was how the price of gas capped out at $4.21 near the end of the Bush/Cheney era in 2008.

This is good old fashioned conservative fear mongering plain and simple; if we re-elect the President gas prices will sky rocket, Iran will destroy Israel, the Constitution will be torn to shreds, dogs and cats will live together … blah, blah, blah. Truth is the price of gas has increased because the U.S. economy is doing better, raising demand for gas along with everything else, and that’s good – not bad; the only way someone like a (God forbid) President Gingrich delivers $2 per gallon gas is if the economy tanks again. Of course the average Tea Party voter doesn’t care about facts, they care about hating the President, and that’s what Newt’s counting on.