While these two camps appear strikingly similar …

“John McCain gets that it now costs $80 to fill up your minivan when it used to cost $40,” [McCain] strategy director Sarah Simmons said.

“When you spend $76 to fill up the tank of your minivan, that’s real money,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)…

… these two camps seem remarkably distant:

Dick Cheney (at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday):  “We have to recognize that there isn’t anything out there that is going to get us away from a hydrocarbon economy anytime in the near future,” the vice president announced. “There really isn’t anything on the horizon that today is economic, relative, for example, to basic, good old oil and gas. … The solution for us in the near term — near term being over the next few years — is to increase production.  For far too long, too many politicians have advocated all kinds of other courses of action without facing up to the basic fundamental fact that today we have a hydrocarbon economy, and if you’re going to have cheap, affordable energy available in the amounts it needs to be to run our economy, you’re going to have to produce more of it.”

And John McCain (from yesterday’s “Today Show”):

McCAIN: …the real key to this is nuclear power, alternate energy. We’ve got to–solar, wind, tide, develop batteries. We have to embark on a national mission, a national mission to become energy independent. Nuclear power has to play a big role in that. Not only for energy independence, but also…
LAUER: So enough of the debate about whether we drill in the wilderness areas, because that’s still oil, oil, oil.
McCAIN: Yeah.
LAUER: Your energy plan will take us away from oil?
Sen. McCAIN: Oh, it’ll have to. We have to.