Newt Gingrich has a dream. He dreams of a world in which "every American can look forward to $2.50-a-gallon gasoline." He'd create this wonderland by radically boosting domestic drilling for oil.

But Gingrich's dream is a fantasy — a great sound bite, perhaps, but one that isn't coming true anytime soon.

Most of what consumers pay for gasoline is based on the price of crude oil, which has been rising. For the average price of gas to decline to $2.50 a gallon, crude would have to fall to about $50 a barrel. It now stands at more than $100.

Gingrich has been joined by the other Republican presidential contenders in criticizing the Obama administration over gas prices. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney called on Obama to fire three top cabinet members — the "gas hike trio" — whom he unconvincingly alleged were hired to "skyrocket" gas prices.

To be sure, Democrats have played this same worn-out card when Republicans have been in the White House and the price at the pump was rising. Barack Obama himself, when he was running for president in 2008, blamed high gas prices on a Washington establishment that refused to stand up to the oil companies.

We trust that Obama has seen the fallacy of that threadbare attack. Presidents cannot adjust the levers of supply and demand as they choose.

At more than $4 a gallon, the price at the pump is biting into consumers' budgets and threatening the economy. It's hurting Obama's approval ratings and causing the administration to pay more attention to the issue.

But there is little Obama — or any other American politician — can do to move the global market for crude oil.

"Political rhetoric is all it is," Guy Caruso, an economist who led the Energy Information Administration and worked as an analyst at the CIA, told CNN recently. "Short of price controls, which were a disaster during the Nixon administration, politicians can't do much to change the price of gasoline."

Why are gas prices rising? Part of it has to do with the price of crude. North Sea crude is rising because production has fallen. Concern over Iran's nuclear program and other turmoil in the Middle East has led to fears of oil disruptions, which has boosted the price. And clearly, speculators on Wall Street are bidding up crude on the world's commodity markets. The price of a barrel of oil was near $108 on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Monday. The price of gasoline is largely a function of this complicated global dance.

That is not to say that presidents and lawmakers have no power. We think Obama erred by opposing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which, in time, would have brought Canadian crude to the United States. And we agree that more domestic drilling is preferable to importing oil from unstable foreign lands.

But increased fuel efficiency is, perhaps, the biggest thing that Americans can do to break our dependence on foreign oil, and on that score, we're doing much better. A decade ago, the average fuel rating for cars and light trucks was a little under 25 miles per gallon. Now it's nearly 30 mpg and expected to rise to 55 mpg by 2025.

And it may well be that it's not the government's fault that the U.S. doesn't have more domestic production. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., chairman of the Senate energy committee, says that 7,000 approved onshore drilling permits aren't being used by the companies that own them and that millions of acres in the Gulf remain unexplored.

But even if all of those permits were in production, control over the price of gasoline would be elusive. We simply can't drill our way to self-sufficiency. We need a comprehensive approach that takes advantages of fuel efficiency, development of alternative fuels and safe drilling.

And we need fewer fantasies designed to mislead the public.

What, if anything, can the president do to bring gas prices down?

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