(H/t Balloon-Juice) So, Barack Obama gives a speech where he lays out some energy proposals. A member of the audience asks what he can do. Obama says that one thing is to simply inflate his tires. If everybody inflated their tires, it would apparently reduce oil consumption by 3 – 4% — which is probably more than what would be gained by McCain’s drilling proposal. The Republican response is to lie about what Obama said and to titter at the notion of people inflating their tires. Obama’s response:
The money quote: “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” While it might be bad for policy decisions, Americans don’t go broke or lose office by trying to out-dumb the other guy. There is a strong strain of American anti-intellectualism. Larry the Cable Guy is living proof of that.
Filling one’s tires may be smart and effective, but nerdy and effeminate. Drilling the hell out of Mother Earth is just about as manly as you can get. And, as Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Bob Allen, and Glenn Murphy remind us, there is nothing more conservative than manly men doing manly things with other men.
Update And, the Indiana angle:
ELKHART, Ind. (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday taunted Republican presidential rival John McCain for first mocking the idea of keeping tires inflated for energy conservation and then agreeing the practice works.
”It will be interesting to watch this debate between John McCain and John McCain,” Obama said as he campaigned in Indiana with Sen. Evan Bayh, widely considered a top-tier candidate for running mate.
Ah, it’s like high school when everyone hated the smart kid. I honestly think people don’t want someone smarter than them in office. Of course they don’t think this outright, but anyone that is exceptionally intelligent is devoid of “common sense” or is an “elitists”.
Maybe I’m just cynical… I dislike both candidates. McCain is downright ignorant. Obama is big government. Pick your poison.
We need a third choice with a chance.
Say – Paris Hilton has good name recognition…
Oh, wait. In her case that means she usually recognizes her own name.
Do you mean the same off shore drilling proposal that senator Obama is now considering supporting to some extent which he previously called a “gimmick”? Now that he and his campaign have read recent polls on the subject and see they have been losing ground to McCain in the polls on the energy debate a shift in his position is happening it seems to me anyway.
Parker- A 3rd candidate gets a chance when people turn from “I gotta vote against the worst one” to “I gotta vote for this one”. It requires a commitment to act on behalf of that one better candidate.
To date, the American people have shown a greater inclination to either not vote at all, or vote for the least worst of the main two. This election is shaping up as being a carbon copy of the last one.
I still think the route third parties have to take is through local elections. I don’t think there is as much sense that people are wasting their vote in that situation, and it ought to be easier to break through with smaller races.
The whole tire guage flap was just bizarre because for anyone paying attention it just underscored how removed McCain is from his supposed natural constituencies, like salt of the earth guys who maintain their own cars, etc. Anyone who does even a bit more than just putting gas in the tank knows low tires kill gas mileage.
I took the Prius in for its first oil change a couple of months ago, and in the days after that the mgp plunged from 50 to about 42-43. The first thing I checked was the tires. The dealer had surmised I didn’t know how to read a guage and must have inadvertently overinflated my tires (I had raised them to levels recommended on Priuschat by their large cohort of obsessive mileage and tire wear geeks). So the dealership dropped my pressure by about ten psi (to below manufacturers recommendations???) and killed the mileage. Granted, the damn thing rode as smooth as a Lincoln Towncar with the pressure that low…
Anyway, McCain and his clean fingernail set don’t appear to know much about cars. Perhaps their drivers can fill them in.
I should note that after going into histrionics about it for a few days and even manufacturing cute little tire guage party favors for the press, McCain now says that of course tire pressure is important.
Doug, you have a point there about local elections. That is one place I know of that most people look at the person, not the party.
Doug and Jason –
So if I understand you guys correctly, first we run Paris Hilton for mayor, or maybe county council?
(Possibly I am reading a bit too much into your comments…)
School board!
Guys, I don’t disagree that there is a better chance of winning for 3rd party candidates at the smallest level of government possible. I’m just saying that there is a lot of talk every four years about how it would be refreshing to get something truly different- and then the action doesn’t follow suit. It really could happen at the highest levels. The biggest group of voters are the ones who don’t turn up, and the next biggest group are the independents. Rs & Ds come in 3rd and 4th.
Besides, the only wasted vote is the one not cast for the candidate you can believe in. I mean, if I voted for Obama or McCain when I believe in Barr. &c.
Beyond that, I just cannot believe that the majority of voters can look at any of the parties and say, “Oh yeah! I gotta have that!”
You might disagree, but I think the Presidency of George W. Bush is the poster child for voting for the lesser of evils.
Recently I heard someone suggest that Bush was poison and Gore was a placebo. Ideally you’d choose real medicine, but if the act of choosing the medicine meant you were getting the poison, that has to effect your calculus.
I’ve come to respect Gore a lot more since 2000, but back then, I didn’t think much of him. Even so, I knew that Bush was bad news and cast my vote accordingly.
At the local level, voting seems like less of a Pascal’s Wager and so taking a chance on the candidate you want instead of the candidate you can probably get seems more palatable.
Mike,
Doug makes a great point, so I’m not even going to touch it.
However, I would be willing to vote for a 3rd party if they looked like they had a chance in the polls.
Think about it…why would anyone refrain from saying they’re going to vote for a 3rd party when that phone pollster calls? It isn’t like you’re going to have to suffer from “wasting” your vote for a poll!
All I’m even looking for is like 20%, something that shows they have better than a snowball’s chance of making it.
If enough people are not even willing to tell a poll taker that they’re going to vote for a 3rd party, then I might as well vote for Hilton or Mayor McCheese this fall. Voting your heart without any regard to reality is what liberals get accused of…
I am missing something?
Look, if you believe in Mayor McCheese, by all means vote for him!
3rd parties have ‘no chance’ for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the collusion between Ds and Rs to do what they can to keep 3rd parties at bay.
As for me, I rather view both McCain and Obama as poison. Neither is likely to kill me, but both appear that they will present a tendancy to slow me down. I rather viewed Bush and Kerry the same way, as well as Bush and Gore. To extend the metaphor, I suppose Barr really is the placebo, because it looks like real medicine, but I’ll never feel the effects, because he isn’t going to win in this self-imposed national grip of Prisoner’s Dillema.
Now, the majority of people must not see it that way. They must see these major party candidates as largely palatable, with one somewhat less flawed than the other. But I can come here to Masson’s Blog and read all about how dangerously flawed McCain is, and go ‘yup’. Then I can go virtually anywhere right of center and read how dangerously flawed Obama is, and go ‘yup’. So, what else can I conclude other than there is mainly deep loathing of one brand or other, and it’s just blind play of Prisoner’s Dillema?
I just wish the cognitive dissonance would kick in, because Obama isn’t going to give full protection of civil liberties or a swift end to the war, and McCain isn’t going to cut spending or lower taxes. It should kick in about 100 days after each election, but all it ever seems to do is drive the Independents like the breeze across to the other side- until the next election.
Oh, I agree that the Ds and Rs see 3rd parties as more of a threat than they do each other. I know for sure that lobbyists see 3rd parties as the worst thing that can happen.
To your point, I do wish people like my Dad, who won’t vote at all because he feels like both sides are liars, would vote for a 3rd party that they trust.
If enough of them got off their asses and voted, no votes would be “wasted” because they wouldn’t have voted anyhow, and maybe then 3rd parties would get the critical mass they need.
The problem then is, what 3rd party? Funny enough, it is just like the OS wars. The Linux community feels that Linux is ready for the “Desktop”. I agree. The problem now is what distribution to use! End users need one-click install ability, and software makers don’t want to have to make separate installers for all the various distributions.
When Dell chose Ubuntu as their flavor, it certainly helped, but then all the Redhat and Slackware guys started pointing out all the flaws of that distro.
If the Linux community could all agree that for the home user, X distro is the best choice, they would have a good chance. It does seem to be leaning to Ubuntu from Dell’s lead.
With all the 3rd parties, they all seem to be fighting for the same scraps. If they could come together (Libertarians seem to be the big one to join under), then their chances might really be helped.
Now, that’s the kind of comment that keeps me blogging — riffing from discussion of 3rd party politics into Linux distribution packages. Awesome.