It panders to the oil lobby. It is poor public policy. Its only saving grace is that it is temporary. Late Tuesday, members of the House, including many who knew they were on the wrong road, yielded to the reality of an election year and repealed the 4.3-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline.

Candidates in the November election now can crow that they cut taxes. However, they are unlikely to be able to trace how their action directly:

Benefited petroleum consumers.

Contributed to reducing the budget deficit.

Encouraged a long view on the country’s energy policy.

There is no guarantee that consumers will recoup one cent of the reduction. The temporary spike in gasoline prices that set the stage for this vote had nothing whatever to do with the 3-year-old tax. Pump prices already were expected to drop by more than 5 cents by mid-summer, partly the result of market forces (Iraqi oil flowing into the marketplace) and oil companies revving up their refineries. Consumers should check the price of their favorite fuel today and see if it drops by a dime come the Fourth of July.

A proposal by Democrats to divert the savings to taxpayers was opposed successfully by Republicans. The mechanics of enforcing a pass-through of the tax to the public would have been awkward and expensive. Requiring service stations to drop their prices by 4.3 cents (a la Gov. Steve Merrill’s proposal for the state gas tax in New Hampshire) would have been equally objectionable to Republicans. The trickle down of this tax cut thus remains only a possibility, most likely, an illusion.

The original proposal, to repeal the tax permanently, would have dented the seven-year, balanced-budget project by an estimated $30 billion. The challenge of restoring a revenue loss of that magnitude more than anything else discouraged Congress from returning the federal tax on gasoline to 14 cents per gallon. But even the modest, seven-month suspension of the tax will nick the budget for $2.9 billion.

Money and imagination are so tight in Washington that making up that difference is expected to take six years. The tax cut will have its summer fling and expire in January, but its fiscal impact will linger until 2002. It will take that long for the $800 million reduction in the Department of Energy budget to restore funds that will provide average motorists with a one-time $15 savings, if they ever see it.

American voters have a quick, election-year tax cut, but they have cheapened what already was a threadbare energy policy.

This temporary rollback will be forgotten soon after the fall campaigns — sometime in mid-December when heating oil prices jump and gas prices drop as they always do. However, the country’s willingness and capacity to perform research and development on alternatives to petroleum fuel will have been diminished for the long term.