On May 13, the Senate engaged in a familiar ritual. A Republican introduced an amendment that would have allowed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. With oil prices well above $100, the oil within the ANWR might be worth as much as a trillion dollars. Senator Domenici spoke in favor, saying: “We can produce in America and put pressure on the world markets and reduce the price of oil.” We were hoping that one of the Democrats who might rise to the logic of Mr. Domenici’s argument would be the man bidding to carry the Democratic Party’s standard in the pending election, but Senator Obama interrupted his campaign to vote against the amendment, which died.

Well, we would like to think that as the campaign develops — or if Mr. Obama wins the presidency — the man from Illinois may yet come around on this issue. After all, one of the stated goals on his campaign Web site, highlighted in bold, is to set America on the path to oil independence. Since Mr. Obama does not propose to eliminate national oil consumption entirely, surely he realizes that his goal requires utilizing the oil that’s available underneath American soil and seabeds. Just as it took a Nixon to go to China, we’d like to think that a Democrat could eventually take the lead in opening American resources to the scale of development that will be required for energy independence.

Mr. Obama’s record would make him the ideal leader to open finally the vast oil deposits underneath the ANWR. Since the 1979 oil crisis, sensible politicians have pointed out that there is no good reason to forbid the safe extraction of our economy’s most vital natural resource. Yet, the Senate vote last week was only the most recent instance whereby efforts to open the ANWR for drilling were thwarted. Should Mr. Obama choose to support drilling in the Arctic Refuge, his record and reputation would enable him to marginalize environmental extremists.

The oil underneath the ANWR offers partial remedies for two of the most serious issues confronting American statesmen today. The high cost of oil is both a burden on the economy and a national security liability, in so far as high oil prices empower some of the word’s most dangerous regimes. The untapped oil in Alaska is not an ultimate solution to either of these problems, just as Nixon’s visit to China ended neither the Cold War nor the war in Vietnam. But, like Nixon’s visit, extracting the oil from the ANWR is a readily available means of mitigating problems that are not amenable to an immediate solution.

There is, moreover, an additional advantage to Mr. Obama in finding an issue like ANWR on which to take the lead. Opposition to oil drilling in the ANWR offers a contradiction of the so-called “what’s the matter with Kansas” thesis, which Mr. Obama recently restated in his remarks about working class voters clinging to guns and religion. Essentially, this thesis, named after the book by Thomas Frank that made it famous, proposes that many working-class Americans vote contrary to their own self-interest because of an irrational concern over trivial cultural issues, which Republican opportunists happily exploit.

Leaving supply-side economics aside, when a west Texas or Louisiana voter, who lives in the shadow of an oil rig, hears a politician say that billions of barrels of oil are off-limits because it would be inhumane to subject an Alaskan Reindeer to the same fate, that voter has an eminently rational reason to reject any politician espousing such nonsense. Precisely this kind of voter has been conspicuous in rejecting Mr. Obama throughout the Democratic primary. The oil-rich Artic National Wildlife Refuge offers Mr. Obama a unique opportunity to convince rural, working class voters that he is on their side after all.