The race starts now in part because the field is settled and more debates will take place this month, but it is actually the “official” start to the race because everyone is back from summer vacation. Sure, there have been reporters in Iowa and New Hampshire all summer, but all the stuff that happened last month was just a preview for the for-real campaign that begins, like the school year, after Labor Day.

The secret is that the “news” in September will be just as inconsequential and silly as the campaign stories of August. We’re sill months away from the first caucus and primaries. No one major is likely to drop out before January. The polls being taken now are just as sketchy and unreliable as the polls taken in June. The fundraising numbers may have some surprises, but we all know Romney and Perry and Bachmann will have enough money to make it through the year. (Even Huntsman will have enough money to remain a weird fake-serious candidate through his first of several primary losses.)

All we’re getting between now and New Year’s is pseudo-events and meta-stories about “narratives” and “messaging” and the lines of attack each campaign already formulated months ago and is waiting to deploy. Just head over to Politico for the news on which candidate is saying what about whom. Will Perry’s debate inexperience harm him? Will he end up sounding glib and arrogant and confident and folksy? Will anyone at all be able to tell the difference? The big stories will be “gaffes” and the skillful deployment of opposition research. And staff turnover! Ed Rollins has quit on Bachmann. Is she flailing or is ditching Rollins a good move? Either interpretation is equally valid!

(Breaking: Sarah Palin is in great shape, along with most of the rest of the candidates.)

It’s important for political writers (including this one!) to convince readers that today’s coverage of what is patently barely news is more worthy of your attention than yesterday’s story on how the GOP needs Mitch Daniels to enter the race or how Bachmann and Palin are not really close personal friends, but we’re still treading water until the voting actually starts.

Don’t get your hopes up, but wouldn’t it be great if this campaign, especially the Bachmann and Perry campaigns, led the country to face the fundamental question of tentherism?

For those of you coming late to the discussion, the Tenth Amendment, written by James Madison to fulfill a bargain even though he thought it unnecessary, states:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In a piece yesterday about Perry’s tentherism, New York Times reporter Manny Fernandez made a pretty serious mistake. He said, in his own voice, that the Tenth Amendment “reserves to the states the powers not explicitly given to the national government.”

If that word “explicitly” was in the 10th Amendment, this would probably be a very different country. But, as you can see from the full text of the amendment above, “explicitly” ain’t in there, although Bachmann and Perry proceed, selectively and erratically and without an honest discussion, as if it were.

Forget about “Obamacare,” the constitutionality of which is now before the courts. If the Congress has only those powers explicitly delegated by the words of the Constitution, then Medicare and Medicaid are unconstitutional. The Constitution never mentions healthcare or insurance, let alone two vast nationalized programs to provide health insurance to the poor and the elderly.

A question

Somebody needs to ask Bachmann and Perry (I’ve tried, multiple times, with Bachmann, but she hasn’t responded) what provision of the Constitution explicitly authorized the creation of Medicare and Medicaid (and, for that matter, the Centers for Disease Control, the VA hospital system and everything else that the feds do in the field of public health)? If these programs are unconstitutional, why do they not explicitly seek their abolition?

By the way, throw in Social Security. The Constitution doesn’t mention public pensions or social insurance or whatever category you want to put Social Security in. We’re saving some serious public dollars now.

Don’t stop there. The Constitution doesn’t explicitly authorize the federal government to maintain a vast network of permanent foreign military bases, doesn’t authorize the creation of the CIA, gives the federal government no explicit power to get into public education. (Bachmann, I know, agrees with this one and favors an end to all federal education spending, but she hasn’t applied the same test to the military and intelligence budgets.) Oh yeah, no mention of federal emergency assistance or disaster relief from floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes.

So, how does the federal government get away with doing all these things that are not explicitly authorized? Well, for starters, the 10th Amendment doesn’t say “explicitly,” although Bachmann and Perry seem to think that “explicitly” is implicitly in there.

The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to tax and spend. It provides federal authority to regulate interstate commerce (the need for such a power was the biggest single reason that the Constitutional Convention was called). It admonishes Congress to “promote the general welfare.” In the famous “elastic clause,” the Constitution gives Congress the “Power – To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” all of the powers “vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

On the military stuff, the Constitution authorizes the national government to “provide for the common defence,” empowers Congress to create an army and a navy (no mention of an Air Force or any Marines), appoints the president as commander in chief of the armed forces, and …

Who decides?

Well, you probably have the idea by now. There are a number of words and phrases in the Constitution that are not very explicit. Perhaps “promoting the general welfare” implies Social Security and Medicare. But if Bachmann and Perry want to go there, how can they make a principled objection if someone else believes that the general welfare promotion or the regulation of interstate commerce implies some other program that they don’t like.

And who’s to decide the limits of these implied powers? Well, the Supreme Court, of course, with its power to decide the constitutionality of acts of Congress. Except for one thing. The Constitution nowhere explicitly grants the Supreme Court any such power.

Oops.

So here’s hoping that at the next debate (which will be the first one featuring Perry and Bachmann together) that the question is asked:

“Do you believe that the Constitution gave Congress the power to create Social Security and Medicare, and if so, where in the Constitution do you find this power, and if not, what do you propose to do about it?”

We are talking only about newsstand sales, not total circulation, but this does mean that Bachmann’s incredibly controversial and very buzzy crazy eyes did not “move the needle,” as annoying people say. Of course, the actual article about Bachmann, inside of the eye-grabbing cover, was pretty bland. But since when does the quality of the journalism have anything to do with newsstand sales?

(Ad pages are also down, but that doesn’t have much to do with Bachmann.)

Meanwhile, Christine O’Donnell, the famous non-witch who lost a Senate race after improbably winning a GOP primary, is traveling the country promoting her inevitable book about the time she didn’t win an election. According to Fort Myers News Press (via Wonkette) the tour is not drawing massive crowds, even in conservative Naples, Florida.

Still, O’Donnell took the turnout of five people — members of the media outnumbered customers — at Barnes & Noble in stride.

“God bless you, Tom,” she told Tom Bruzzesi of Fort Myers, who said he’s launching his own presidential campaign.

“I like her,” Bruzzesi said. “She’s kind of a rogue like me.”

“Thank you for coming out today,” O’Donnell said to Louise Campo of Naples. “She interests me. She’s very conservative,” Campo said.

O’Donnell, a Christian, then politely turned down a request from a young man who asked her to sign his book on demonology instead of a copy of her book.

Well, that’ll happen. As Keith Olbermann reported last night, the book as thus far sold 2,200 copies, 1,500 of which went to O’Donnell supporters in Delaware:

This after a publicity blitz that notably included kicking herself off of Piers Morgan’s CNN show. (And now O’Donnell’s been disinvited, again, from a Tea Party Rally that is supposed to feature Sarah Palin.)

All this after Sarah Palin — the barometer of how America is receiving vacuous avatars of cultural resentment masquerading as Republican politicians — saw her much ballyhooed documentary open to weak numbers and quickly end up on DVD.

The last use any of these people have is as boogeymen with which to terrify liberals.

(Except for Rick Perry. That crazy corrupt jerk could end up president if we’re not careful.)

But Bachmann’s will be widely remarked upon, picked over by bloggers and journalists, and probably a best-seller. It will also be just a boring as Bill Richardson’s “Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life.” Because the book marks the completion of Michele Bachmann’s transformation into an establishment candidate.

Here’s one hint that the book won’t be worth your time, from the AP: “Sentinel declined comment on reports that Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund co-wrote the memoir.” Yep, John Fund. Longtime Wall Street Journal and American Spectator columnist John Fund. John Fund of regular attendance at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday breakfasts and New York’s Monday equivalent, and a long and undistinguished career of toeing the party line and cranking out sober propaganda for the business class of the conservative movement. If John Fund wrote this book, it will disappoint those looking for true nuttiness. (Sarah Palin, by contrast, hired a collaborator with a more colorful résumé.)

If the Michele Bachmann of 2006 were releasing a memoir, we’d have something to look forward to. Specifically, we’d have uncensored, unapologetic Dominionist fringe Christian right politics to look forward to, along with some obvious, glaring factual inaccuracies and probably some nice purple prose. If this is a John Fund book, though, it will have all the dishonesty with none of the charm. He’s not the world’s most thrilling author, and he was hired not to capture Bachmann’s voice but to make it more professional.

Bachmann’s already had all her entertaining edges smoothed out. She’s on the trail doing an about-face on farm subsidies in Iowa. The clip of her saying “who likes white people” is actually a clip of her talking about “wet people,” because of rain. The quote about God causing hurricanes to convince the government to stop spending was a bad joke, not a serious statement of sincere religious belief. She officially quit her controversial church, just like Barack Obama. She’s practically ceding the gay-hating vote to Rick Santorum, declining to defend the strident bigotry that made her famous in Minnesota. At this point, she’s a standard right-wing Republican with a nuttier-than-usual past. That nuttier-than-usual past has been well documented by journalists, and will be softened for mass consumption in her official campaign memoir. (Though maybe she’ll clarify which Gore Vidal book made her a Republican.)

Bachmann dialed back on the anti-gay and antiabortion rhetoric once the Tea Party moment happened, sounding less like Pat Robertson and more like Ron Paul. Once she became a legitimate contender for the nomination, she went even more vanilla. The most interesting Bachmann stories of the summer have been about things she said and did years ago. She’s boring now! Thank God Rick Perry’s book came out before he made up his mind to run.

(Though Bachmann still probably believes all that horrible stuff. She’s just smart enough not to say it out loud anymore.)

She may have been listening to The Donald. In his short-lived run for the White House, Donald Trump said he would bring the price of oil down by seizing the oil fields of Iraq and Libya and putting total production of these two countries in our gasoline stations. Two problems with that scenario: First, the seized oil would have to first pass through the world market where it would be available to the highest bidder. And two, it would be a criminal act of the highest order. Details.

More likely, she is looking at Newt Gingrich’s plan from 2008. Gingrich proposed opening up the spigots on the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and dumping the whole stockpile on the open market. Gingrich said that the sudden influx of new oil would drive speculators out of the market and the price of petroleum would drop significantly. Economists agree that the market would see a sudden drop if that were to happen.

But once you have emptied the 727 million barrels of crude from the SPR on the market, which the world would drink up in a month (faster, if cheaper), there would be nothing left in the strategic tank to offset real supply disruptions caused by war, OPEC manipulation or natural disaster.

Political gag

A president could order such a thing, however. The International Energy Agency may punish such misbehavior, but the price of gasoline at the pump would fall below $2 a gallon for about a week before oil investors figured out it was only a political gag.

Of course, she could, with Congress’s help, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling. That would cause a slight lowering of prices for a short time. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are roughly 7 billion barrels of recoverable crude in the ANWR. Americans consume more than 20 million barrels of petroleum a day. So if we kept all that oil for ourselves, we would use every last drop of it within a year. But the price of gasoline at the pump would likely fall to $2 a gallon before the markets realized politicians had just been dreaming.

One will hear Congresswoman Bachmann say as a candidate that there is more oil in three western states of America than in Saudi Arabia. She will bemoan the fact that it is currently against the law to drill and explore in much of that area. She will also say that the bulk of that petroleum is in the form of shale-oil.

There is no question there is a lot of it, but it is locked up inside of rocks, like marlstone. The rock is super-heated and the petroleum vaporizes. It is then condensed. It is so simple that high school students can perform the operation in chemistry class. But the kids aren’t paying the bills for the energy required to heat the rocks.

Such annoying details, however, are the first calculations of companies like Exxon-Mobil. It threw itself into shale oil recovery, and then exited when it found it simply cost too much to make a profit. Royal Dutch Shell is interested in shale oil, but costs are high and the process of extraction uses an awful lot of water. Water is, increasingly, a concern in the West. It is an increasing concern in Estonia, where oil shale is the main source of petroleum. According to a 2004 technical paper called “Shale Oil. A Scientific-Technical Journal” by Anto Raukas, 91 percent of all of the water consumed in Estonia was consumed by the oil shale industry.

You may not hear this from the candidate, but shale oil is not crude oil. It contains a higher level of nasty chemicals that tend to pollute and harm humans. The process, known as retorting, also yields significant amounts of mercury. I’m not sure how she squares her comfort with that kind of mercury with her horror for the mercury in compact fluorescent light bulbs. Details.

One other troubling detail Congresswoman Bachmann may have some difficulty explaining. First, it is well established that President Ronald Reagan is an icon of Bachmann’s political career. How then will she explain that it was President Ronald Reagan who, in 1986, signed a bill into law that abolished the United States Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program. Reagan took the government out of the shale oil business.

Supply and demand

Martin Feldstein was President Reagan’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. In a July 2008 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Feldstein wrote on the subject of lowering oil prices. Boiling it down, Feldstein said there were two roads to bringing prices down. One was the immediate expansion of supply. By flooding the market with oil, the price drops because the supply would exceed demand for a time. The other solution (and remember, this is a conservative writing) is “increases in government subsidies to develop technology that will make future cars more efficient, or tighter standards that gradually improve the gas mileage of the stock of cars, would lower the future demand for oil, and therefore the price of oil today.”

So there are two approaches to lowering the price of petroleum. Her proposal to increase supply through the development of shale oil will likely drive prices higher because of the increased well-head cost of the production of a barrel of oil from rock. Her calculations fail to take into consideration the environmental and health costs to the taxpayer of shale oil production. Expanding the supply in that fashion will not, according to a number of oil experts weighing in on her proposal, bring prices down.

As president, Michele Bachmann could drive prices for gasoline below $2 per gallon. She could reduce demand by putting the full force of her office behind conservation, technology and efficiency and drive the demand for oil as low as it can go. Or she could get it as low as it was in the last days of the George W. Bush administration and as low as when President Obama took office by simply sending us back to a worldwide depression.

As I said, Michele Bachmann, as president of the United States, could keep her promise of lowering the price of gasoline. What voters must ask themselves is: “What will that cost me?”

Don Shelby writes about a variety of topics, and he has a special interest in the environment and ecology. Before retiring in 2010, he worked for 32 years as anchor, investigative reporter and environmental correspondent for WCCO-TV in Minnesota.