Seemingly every Republican is walking around today with a tire gauge labeled “Obama’s Energy Plan.”
Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, holding up the tire gauge as a prop:
Now, that’s an interesting thing – – we want you to have good pressure in your tires, you know, it will very mildly add to your fuel efficiency — but checking the air pressure in your tires is not an energy policy for the United States of America.”
Liberal bloggers say they don’t understand:
[Obama] apparently said the amount of energy to be saved by routine auto maintenance is comparable to the savings we’d get from the GOP’s coastal drilling policy. I have no idea if that’s true — it may very well not be — and I’ll be happy to let energy policy experts weigh in on whether Obama exaggerated the significance of scheduled car care. If he did, Obama should obviously drop this line from his speeches.
I hope McCain and his surrogates remember the key point in this — not that checking your tire pressure has a marginal impact and that two-thirds of drivers already have the right tire pressure, but that Obama said it would generate as much as offshore drilling — roughly 1.6 trillion gallons in the OCS. We went over the math this Wednesday, and Obama’s just not right (and that’s with me using an extremely generous assessment that tire inflation would increase mileage 12.5 percent for one-third of America’s drivers). It’s not merely that Obama’s energy policy consists of recommending the minute and mundane, but that he does so while rejecting solutions that could have a dramatic impact on energy production, oil production, and gas prices. He’s either not familiar enough with the issue, or way too careless in asserting the benefits of his policies. That’s the message voters need to come away with, not just, “Ha, ha! Look, a tire gauge!”