We are opposed to Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s proposal to suspend the gas tax — and to cut several other taxes — this summer because, like an alcoholic reeling out of control on booze, the United States needs to kick its addiction to petroleum.

Our opposition should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of McCain’s Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, nor does it mean that we are necessarily opposed to McCain’s candidacy as the presumptive nominee for his party for the presidency.

In a time when discipline and good sense desperately need to be restored to the federal government, McCain could not be any less subtle in his pandering to the voters by offering gas-tax relief during the summer lead-up time to November’s presidential election.

Specifically, he called on Senate colleagues to join him in supporting the Kyle-McCain amendment to H.R. 1195, the Highway Technical Corrections Bill. The Gas Tax Holiday Amendment would suspend the 18.4 cents per gallon federal gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day 2008.

This summer, considering that the arduous process involved in airplane travel these days has dragged it from its onetime perch of lofty comfort down to the level of riding on a gritty cross-country bus, even more Americans than usual will probably choose to drive their cars to summer vacation spots — a reality from which McCain might be hoping to benefit politically.

Surely, McCain also is well aware that the polls show that the nation’s financial woes have replaced the Iraq war as the top concern for voters. Therefore, since his stance on continuing the war in Iraq is highly unpopular, he is going for the easy applause line by offering a proposal that would lower gas prices immediately.

While we all would love to lessen the ever-increasing pain at the pump, McCain’s quick-fix plan would backfire in the following ways:

• It would cost the federal government an estimated $9 billion, which would otherwise go to roads, bridges and other badly needed infrastructure improvements, while increasing the already enormous federal deficit that will have to be shouldered by our children and their children — and beyond.

• It would amount to a government-sanctioned incentive for the public to drive gas-guzzling vehicles and for car manufacturers to continue making them — at a time when even President George Bush, a former Texas oilman, acknowledges that the U.S. needs to cut back its greenhouse-gas emissions.

• It would camouflage and likely divert public attention from the obscene world-record profits that oil companies and oil-price speculators are making off the breaking backs of the increasingly impoverished, but still car-dependent, American public.

Call us cynics, but McCain’s timing for issuing his proposal — April 15, the tax-filing deadline — pretty much exposes his short-term political motivations. There’s no well-thought-out plan here for long-term economic renewal — not to mention any lasting solution to the need for alternative energy sources.

But then McCain is the man who has famously admitted that economics is not one of his strong suits — and this proposal surely proves his point.