GOP Can Energize Campaign

While the Dow is up about 1,000 points since early June, investors are nervous as we head into the typically tempestuous months of September and October, and with good reason. The prospect of an Obama victory in November doesn’t inspire the bulls, nor does 10 more weeks of negative campaigning from both sides.

Candidate Romney has a chance to change the tone, starting today when the GOP’s nominating convention convenes in Tampa — and there have finally been hopeful signs of late that his campaign is moving in that direction.

Look for the Romney-Ryan team to start accentuating a positive scenario for the US economy for the rest of the decade — a scenario built on full energy independence for the country.

“This is not some pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. This is a real, achievable objective,” Romney told a crowd in New Mexico on Thursday. It’s a plan Romney says would ensure North American energy independence by 2020, an outcome that could produce 3 million new jobs and $1 trillion in new revenue.

Of course, promising energy independence has been a staple of presidential stump speeches since the Nixon years. The difference in 2012 is that the marriage of U.S. technology and our untapped resources both on and off federal lands now gives that promise real teeth.

This is a condensed version of Terry Keenan's most recent column in the New York Post, read more at NYPost.com