Members of Congress have been scrambling lately to tell Americans that there are no quick and easy fixes to high gas prices. "There is not a panacea of short-term solutions to the [gasoline] price situation today because it's a demand-driven price," said House Energy Committee chairman Joe Barton, Republican from Texas, at a news conference Wednesday. House Ways and Means committee member Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana concurred: "I don’t think there’s any magic political solution." And Congressman Adam Putnam of Florida, a member of the House Republican leadership, says that at a bipartisan House and Senate meeting on gas prices with President Bush on Wednesday, all the participants from both parties recognized that "there are very few things we can do immediately" to reduce the price of gas.

In fact, there's one obvious thing Congress and the President could do. But around Capitol Hill only a few lonely voices are willing to talk about it — most of them not for attribution. "You have to encourage people to conserve," says one Republican staffer.

Gasp. Tell Americans to drive less? Though a fractional reduction in driving across the country would dramatically reduce demand and prices, few things are more frightening to public officials, especially six months before an election, than telling Americans to conserve.