After firmly opposing offshore drilling as a policy of pointless pandering, and getting a lot of heat for it from the McCain campaign, last Friday Barack Obama abruptly announced that he would reverse his position.

That’s change you can believe in, right there. He changed his policy before our very eyes:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Friday he would back limited offshore drilling as part of a broader energy package that attempted to bring down gas prices and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Obama dropped his blanket opposition to any expansion of offshore drilling and signaled support for a bipartisan compromise in Congress aimed at breaking a deadlock on energy that includes limited drilling.

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post during a tour of Florida.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done,” Obama told the newspaper.

In a statement, Obama said he remained skeptical of the value of expanded offshore drilling in fighting rising gas prices. He has said he prefers oil companies to use the land already available.

We can’t even complain that we didn’t see it coming. Because this is precisely what Obama promised us he was going to do as president: bring us all together, Republicans and Democrats, and forge consensus, heal all our George Bush wounds by applying the balm of compromise.

Way back in February 2007, Matt argued that Obama’s notion of compromise as a cure-all was distinctly defective.

Obama constantly repeats the word bipartisan as if the magical solution to the problems we face is somehow averaging the positions between the two sides.

The problem, of course, was that it sounded very much like he would take a sensible, reasoned policy position held by Democrats and an arbitrary, senseless position embraced by Republicans, and he would feel obliged to average the two.

It was, at that time, always possible to hope that even if that was what Obama’s rhetoric of healing was sounding like, that wasn’t what he would actually ever do.

And now that’s exactly what he’s done.

The facts of the matter are clear. Drilling, offshore or in ANWR, does almost nothing to address the problem of the runaway increase in gas prices. It will have a practically insignificant impact on oil supply and therefore prices, and even this impact lies years in the future. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, “production would not be expected to start before 2017″ and offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030″.

That has not stopped John “Pants on Fire” McCain from embracing offshore drilling as the best way to bring short-term relief to consumers. As short a time ago as last Monday, McCain was proudly standing up and smoothly pitching practiced lies to voters on the subject:

John McCain again pushed for offshore drilling Monday, and suggested it could provide relief to American consumers “within a matter of months.”

How thoroughly cynical and dishonest McCain’s position is can be seen from the fact that McCain himself, in a weak moment, has acknowledged that offshore drilling would at best have only a psychological impact on crude oil prices today and gas prices at the pump, and his chief economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, has stated that new offshore drilling would have no immediate effect on supplies or prices.

But voters, to their eternal shame, have been buying the snake oil McCain is selling.

And Obama has obviously decided that, the merits of his previous policy notwithstanding, it was time to fold for political advantage. It’s a little inconvenient that just the day before his about-face, Obama told a Missouri voter: “What I don’t want to do is say something because it sounds good politically.”