Udall reverses opposition to offshore drilling

Battered on the energy issue for weeks, Democratic Senate candidate Rep. Mark Udall moved Wednesday to close the distance with his Republican opponent on the issue, calling for more domestic drilling and reversing his long-standing opposition to drilling off America's shores.

Both were sharp turnarounds for a man who has made the expansion of renewable energy a cornerstone of his career and who has consistently dinged the aggressive drilling policies of the Bush administration during this campaign.

But both Udall and his staff emphasized that the nation's energy crisis called for a sweeping rethinking of possible solutions -- and that the country could no longer afford to keep much of anything off the table.

At a news conference Wednesday with Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., Udall announced that he was embracing -- with a few additions -- a bipartisan proposal hatched recently in the Senate, one that he said would break the country's current energy policy "logjam."

The proposal by five Republicans and five Democrats (the so-called Gang of 10) would allow much more expansive offshore drilling but also creates a $20 billion program to shift 85 percent of cars from petroleum-based fuels within two decades.