For years now, John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He's been loud and relentless on the subject--and wise. "It's a national security issue," he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that "do not like us very much," he noted. That was McCain's understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort.

So you'd think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn't. There's an intellectual and political hole in McCain's position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates.

Republicans have seized on public anger over $4 per gallon gasoline and are calling for domestic oil production in federal lands and offshore areas now closed to exploration and drilling. Since polls show the public agrees with them, Republicans believe "drilling"--the one-word capsulation of the issue--is their strongest political talking point in 2008. Indeed, it may be their only good domestic issue.

But they desperately need a champion to carry their message, someone whom the national media cannot ignore. And that should be McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. Except for one thing: He doesn't go along with their approach in important ways. He sounds, sometimes anyway, like a liberal Democrat or a lobbyist for the environmental movement.

McCain favors increased domestic oil production, but not drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the barren area with large (and recoverable) oil reserves. President Bush and most Republicans want to open ANWR for drilling and have for years. But McCain is adamant. His aides insist it's a waste of time trying to persuade him to change his mind. He wouldn't want oil companies to drill in ANWR, McCain says, "any more than I would want them to drill in the Grand Canyon or the Everglades."

As for exploration and drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida, McCain says that's fine. Only there's a catch: States must decide. "I would like to give them incentives and increased revenues from oil that was recovered off the shores of Florida and California, et cetera, but being a federalist, I am not going to force them to do that," he told Glenn Beck last month.

A federalist on what he regards as a grave national security threat? That's an odd stance. It seems more like a dodge--a very un-McCain-like tactic--than a logical position. Nor does he take into account the new technology that allows drilling for oil and gas in deep waters far offshore with little risk of spillage or pollution of beaches.

In McCain's defense, he acquired his environmental leanings honestly, not opportunistically. He adopted the conservationist strain of his Arizona predecessor, Barry Goldwater, and was influenced on ANWR when he served in the House with Morris Udall, the Arizona Democrat who was something of a mentor to McCain.