When it comes to doing something about skyrocketing gasoline prices in an election year, George W. Bush is proving that he, too, can be a flip-flopper. The president is doing things he once said he would never do, such as fiddling with the nation's petroleum reserve to boost supply.

Late last summer, when prices at the pump spiked just after Hurricane Katrina, neither he nor his party faced an imminent rendezvous with the ballot box — and Bush was all talk without action on the subject. But this time, the White House is in full panic over the thought that gas could be pushing $4 a gallon this summer as Republican control of Congress hangs in the balance.

Indeed, little else the president and his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill do during the next few months will shape their fate in November as much as what happens to the price of fuel.

Gasoline is much more than an economic commodity. It is a political touchstone as well, one of the few universal purchases that consumers can so easily compare over time. The prices of a gallon emblazoned on service station signs provide ubiquitous reminders of the rising cost — and a tempting symbol for individuals to use in measuring their economic well-being. There's nothing like the price at the pump for provoking conversation at the water cooler.

Consumer confidence can take a hit when gas prices go up. Though the national figure unexpectedly rose in April, the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research found that it dipped in that state as soon as the recent price hikes for gasoline took effect, ending several months of rising confidence in the economy by Floridians.

When the gasoline bill puts Americans in a bad mood, rightly or wrongly they hold their government leaders personally responsible for it. Bush is especially vulnerable because so many experts cite instability in the Middle East, provoked by the war in Iraq, as putting a risk premium on the price of crude oil.

While Bush struggled last week to present plans for driving down retail fuel prices, he stands firm against the one move that might change things: getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. Such an announcement, while not guaranteeing stability in that country anytime soon, would probably be greeted well by oil markets and cut prices in time for the midterm elections.

Still, the president has reversed himself on other measures, such as stopping the flow of oil into the nation's reserves, releasing more fuel to private markets. He eased clean-air rules to encourage more production. And he aggressively advocates alternative-fuel development.

History shows that Bush is quite right to cut and run from his longstanding opposition to federal action against high gas prices. Some of the lowest presidential approval ratings came at times when the nation faced a gas crisis.

Even the Watergate scandal could not rival a 1973 gasoline shortage for pushing Richard M. Nixon down in the polls. His approval rating already in the mid-30s as Watergate enveloped his White House, it was an OPEC oil embargo against the United States that drove his numbers below 30 percent.

Like Nixon's Watergate woes, Jimmy Carter's supposed undoing — the Iranian hostage crisis — was not the poll killer that high gas prices proved to be in the summer of 1979, when he plunged from 40 percent approval to 28 percent, according to Gallup. And a surge in pump prices late in 1990 dragged down the popularity that George Bush enjoyed during the runup to the Persian Gulf War.

This president has already seen what sticker shock at the pump can do to his popularity. The short-lived rise to $3 a gallon just after Katrina was enough to cut Bush's approval by several points, to 40 percent.

Bush must go further than most presidents if he is to have any hope of convincing voters that he is on their side in the fight against the high cost of driving. His own background as an oil executive in Texas and his administration's coziness with the energy industry are much more established in the public mind than his apparent last-minute conversion to petro-populism.

Instead of jawboning oil companies to go easy on consumers — a step the president still shuns — this administration early in its tenure invited them to private sessions on developing energy policies to their liking and then went to court to prevent Congress from finding out specifically who attended those meetings. So far, all Bush has been able to muster in the way of directly pressuring oil bosses is a tepid call for an investigation of price gouging.

For the sake of his party's future, Bush needs to flip-flop some more and take on the oil barons, maybe even threaten a tax on excess profits. That would be a huge reversal for him, but his political team knows well that if voters are paying $4 a gallon to get to the polls in November, Republicans will pay the highest price of all.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.