Here's how a small group of militants in West Africa can help keep an issue alive in presidential politics in Indiana and Washington.

On Sunday morning, an e-mail arrived from a representative of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) announcing that 36 hours earlier, the group had overrun a "heavily fortified" Royal Dutch Shell oil installation in Nigeria's Bayelsa state.

When commodity markets opened in New York Monday, crude oil prices pierced the $120-a-barrel threshold for the first time before settling at $119.97, a record.

The $3.65 jump in crude oil prices helped sustain the intensity of political debates about gasoline prices, which Monday stood at a national average of $3.61 a gallon - a penny shy of a record and up about 55 cents this year. In an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" Monday, President Bush said that the price of gasoline troubled him "a lot" and that rising gasoline prices were "like a tax on the working people".

However troubled Bush and other political leaders may be, oil experts said the small cushion of excess capacity around the world could mean a continuation of the recent volatility of oil prices at a high level. That could result in a long, hot summer for drivers, and it could leave the domestic U.S. politics of gasoline hostage to outside events.