That's my take. It's a wink and a nod within the republican party. They're saying to each other: "listen, I don't like this and you don't like this but the folks in Appalachia, they're eating it up. This is what we have to do."
McCain is nearly 72. He's just can't be as stupid as he's coming across (or can he?).
Take a look at McCain's blog sometime. About 4 people do most of the posting and they're mostly silly posts about OBAMA! McCain's appealing to the people more susceptible to these juvenile tactics.
Time: How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters.
But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.
In fact, Obama's actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that's not what's so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less.
The RNC is trying to make the tire gauge a symbol of unseriousness, as if only the fatuous believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil without doing the bidding of Big Oil.
Obama's energy plan
*For those who don't read this blog often, "white working class" is code for the folks who are less educated (I'm not just talking school-wise) and not inclined to vote for a black man. They can't reckon between the fact that they, white people, have their station and Obama, a black man is running for president. Geographically, they mostly live in the Appalachian regions and their culture is more insular. Hillary sent Bill Clinton to appeal to these folks and it worked well.
