Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge was trying to talk to a small group several days ago about his bill to curb energy market manipulation. His Republican challenger, Dan Mansell, kept interrupting, saying more drilling and more oil refineries -- not more regulation -- were needed.

"I'm sorry he is such an angry young man," Etheridge told a handful of people at the T.R. Lee Gas Station, which has been a Main Street landmark in Clayton since 1956.

"I'm angry about the energy costs," shot back Mansell, who is 52.

Gas stations have replaced barbecue joints on the political circuit. With gas prices rising above $4 per gallon in many places, political candidates are scrambling to show voters that they feel their pain at the pump. There are calls for investigations, offshore drilling, new mileage standards, tax breaks for hybrids, and federal gas-tax holidays.

Candidates from the two parties have offered markedly different responses.

Republican candidates, including presidential hopeful John McCain, North Carolina Sen. Elizabeth Dole and GOP gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory, are calling for the end of the 27-year ban on oil and gas exploration off the Atlantic Coast, including North Carolina. On Thursday, the state Senate released a statement calling for offshore drilling.

"I think we are hypocritical, if you drove a car to get here, to say we should not have offshore or deep-sea explorations, because what you are really saying is: 'I'm willing to take oil from some place except my own backyard,' " McCrory said Monday.

The Democrats, including presidential candidate Barack Obama, U.S. Senate candidate Kay Hagan and gubernatorial candidate Beverly Perdue, oppose offshore oil drilling.

"North Carolina's coast is in Hurricane Alley and has been called the Graveyard of the Atlantic for a reason," said Perdue, who is from the coastal town of New Bern. "I haven't seen anything that proves to me that drilling there can be done safely or bring down oil prices."

Experts say that despite all the rhetoric, most of the proposals being discussed on the campaign trail -- no matter how meritorious -- will have little effect on gas prices in the foreseeable future.

"The political debate is a bit misinformed," said Ken Medlock, an economist and energy expert at Rice University in Houston.

Would drilling help?

Medlock said it would be years before motorists would see any advantage at the pump from offshore oil drilling. And he said critics were exaggerating the environmental risks of drilling, citing studies showing that offshore platforms were far safer than the oil tankers now being used to transport oil.

"The only thing we can do is change our own habits," Medlock said. "Conservation is the most powerful tool we have for the long term."

North Carolina's political leadership had by and large opposed drilling off the state's 300-mile coastline, which is among the most ecologically fragile and least industrialized in the country. Democrats such as Govs. Mike Easley and Jim Hunt and Republicans such as Dole and Congressman Walter Jones opposed undersea oil exploration.

Several oil companies obtained leases to explore off the North Carolina coast in the early 1980s, but they didn't drill before the federal ban took effect in 1990. The nearest leases were about 40 miles east of the Outer Banks, the area most promising for exploration.

But public opinion has begun to change as gas prices have risen to levels that would have been almost unimaginable just a few years ago.

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