WASHINGTON – With oil prices over $2 a gallon, airlines charging fuel surcharges, and the head of the nation’s largest retailer complaining about a “fuel tax,” one would think the secretary of energy would be in the news.

Add to that concern that Iran may be developing nuclear arms, and the scrutiny grows.

Yet the energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, has in recent weeks made headlines mostly for appealing to Arab American voters in Michigan and for announcing federal grants for hightech energy projects in Pennsylvania.

To the befuddlement of Democrats who lived through the drubbing of the Clinton administration over oil prices that hit the $30 range in the run-up to the 2000 election, Mr. Abraham has kept a low profile and stayed out of the hot seat.

The campaign of Senator Kerry is trying to gain some political advantage from a situation some critics call an unfolding energy “crisis.” Yet it is unclear that crude-oil prices in the $55 range can wedge themselves into an election campaign so crowded by concerns about war and terrorism, particularly given the Massachusetts senator’s advocacy of “green” forms of energy that likewise are expensive.

Nonetheless, the Kerry campaign is trying.

“These prices are hurting the economy and they’re squeezing working families. This president has no ideas for dealing with this crisis and pretty soon he’s going to be out of time. It’s time for a fresh start,” a Kerry campaign spokesman, Phil Singer, said.

Even so, the tone is quiet compared to 2000, when Governor Bush took Vice President Gore to account, blaming the prices on “failed energy policy for the past eight years.” The energy secretary then, Bill Richardson, was under the microscope and in the spotlight, denouncing the prices as “unacceptably high,” traveling to Saudi Arabia, and pressuring for OPEC increases in production – with some success.

As shortages of heating oil loomed in the Northeast, President Clinton released 30 million barrels from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve and released $400 million from a fund that provides emergency energy assistance to low-income families.

Mr. Abraham ought to take similar steps, his critics say, from increasing fuel-efficiency standards and conservation, to lending out oil from the strategic reserve.

“We want to know that Secretary Abraham is doing everything he can to protect consumers from price shocks. Some are long-term and some are near-term,” the senior vice president for external affairs at the liberal Center for American Progress, Alyssondra Campaigne, said.

“We simply cannot drill our way out of this issue,” she said.

Mr. Abraham could also speak out against the high prices in an effort to calm the market, people familiar with the Clinton-era strategies suggested.

“Just sending a signal that the energy secretary is willing to be engaged in the marketplace in a proactive respect has a tendency to burst speculative bubbles,” a federal energy policy expert, who declined to be identified by name, said.

Some critics go as far as to speculate that Mr. Abraham is staying out of the spotlight intentionally, to play down an issue that is reaching “crisis” proportions.

“I think he’s a cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney energy policy and there’s nothing to cheer about,” Michael Klare, author of the new book “Blood and Oil,” said. Mr. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

Rather than debate short-term fixes, the administration prefers to keep the discussion on long-term solutions to the problem.

Asked for a statement on the issues, Mr. Abraham’s office produced a speech from 2002 in which he outlined the administration’s energy plan, drawn up in 2001 by a task force headed by Vice President Cheney. A bill that would implement the plan, which emphasizes increasing domestic drilling and production, has been stuck in the Senate, thanks to a Democratic filibuster.

“We strongly support allowing the same free-market principles that so efficiently determine the prices of other goods and commodities to apply equally to all energy markets,” Mr. Abraham said in the speech.

Supporters of the administration’s plan said he should be out proclaiming it from the rooftops during the campaign.

“He should be out making the case that the president presented an energy plan to the nation and Congress has been sitting on it for three years,” the director of global-warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Myron Ebell, said. The institute is a conservative environmental think tank.

Mr. Abraham has declined to dip into the strategic reserve. It is strictly for emergencies, he has said, taking the line of candidate Bush in 2000.

The administration made a rare exception last month by lending 1.7 million barrels of oil from the reserve to two refineries that were running short of crude oil as a result of Hurricane Ivan.

As for “jawboning” the Saudi Arabians to open the spigots, Mr. Abraham said he received a “significant” commitment from the oil-producing countries to expand their production, after a meeting with ministers from OPEC member nations in September.

But many analysts said there is simply no more capacity left.

“I don’t know that they are capable of turning on the spigot in the way most people think they are,” Mr. Ebell said.

While he is surprised that Mr. Abraham has kept a low profile, Mr. Ebell said it reflected a laissez-faire under standing of oil markets.

“In the short term I’m not sure what the secretary of energy can say apart from a lot of political flimflam,” Mr. Ebell said.

Similarly, the director of natural resource studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, Jerry Taylor, said: “Oil prices are set by global supply-and-demand dynamics that are beyond the control of the federal government. There is very little the secretary can do.”

Indeed, according to a former top policy aide to Mr. Abraham and to Mr. Cheney, Cesar Conda, releasing part of the strategic reserve would have little impact.

“You could pander to the voters and say I’m doing something,” Mr. Conda said, but he also said analysts maintain it would reduce gas prices only slightly. Mr. Conda served as Mr. Cheney’s principal adviser on domestic policy and had been legislative director to Mr. Abraham when he served as a senator from Michigan.

Known as a quiet man who kept a low profile during his one term in the Senate, Mr. Abraham was in some ways a curious choice for the job. While a senator, he called for the abolition of the department, which some conservatives criticize as a dispensary for corporate welfare through its research-and development programs.

Mr. Abraham is “a firm believer” in the free market and the enterprise economy. “That is his philosophical bent overall,” Mr. Conda said.

The energy secretary was a cofounder of the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal organization, while a law student at Harvard in the early 1980s.

He is a movie buff and a baseball fanatic, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the sport’s statistics and an enduring loyalty to the Detroit Tigers.

A native of East Lansing, Mich., and a grandson of immigrants from Lebanon, Mr. Abraham was deployed last week to tell Arab American voters, “George Bush cares about this community.”

“Politics ran in his family,” Mr. Conda said, noting that Mr. Abraham’s mother was active in local Republican politics as he was growing up.

Mr. Abraham, 52, is a former co-chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. He also served as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Quayle in 1990-91.

Despite lucrative campaign contributions from the automotive industry, Mr. Abraham lost his seat in 2000 to a Democrat, Debbie Stabenow.

He was chosen for the energy post despite letting it be known that he would have liked to be secretary of transportation.

He ended up in a position that leaves little room for improvisation. One reason is the large role in setting energy policy that is played by Mr. Cheney, with whom he is said to have a good relationship. The job also carries heavy responsibilities related to securing America’s nuclear stockpile, a task some argue would be better left to the Department of Defense.

It is difficult for anyone to “shine” in such a “thankless” position, Mr. Ebell said. “You could only get noticed if you lost a few tons of nuclear waste,” he said.

Whether the climbing oil prices will have any impact on Mr. Abraham’s future or on the presidential election is unclear.

“Normally this would be a big issue,” said a political scientist at the University of Virginia who studies political races, Larry Sabato. “But so would a lot of other things being discussed. Voters don’t have room on their plate for them. They are voting on war, on terrorism, the war in Iraq, and jobs.”

Energy was a more prominent issue in the 2000 campaign for a reason, Mr. Sabato said. “It was the Seinfeld election – the election about nothing,” he said of the Gore-Bush contest. “We talked about lock boxes.”