Given Barack Obama's bracing summons to civic duty this week, telling the masses to keep their tires properly inflated to save gas, I was surprised and a little disappointed that the tire maintenance section of my local AutoZone was so uninhabited.
Customers, many of whom obviously had been crawling under cars and trucks, lined up at the cash register clutching various petrochemicals -- transmission fluid, gas treatment, oil, ring sealant -- but nobody was buying tire gauges. So I waited.
At a campaign stop in Springfield, Mo., the Illinois senator suggested that if Americans simply kept their tires inflated to spec, the nation could conserve as much oil as is expected to be pumped out of the ocean with the additional offshore drilling favored by his rival, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.
Obama's comment touched off a maelstrom of bad arithmetic in the blogosphere, an angels-on-pins debate over how much, exactly, we could save by having proper tire inflation, competing estimates of reserves in the outer continental shelf, and fascinating arcana about the amount of gasoline refined from a 42-gallon barrel of sweet crude (about 20 gallons) and the energy extraction costs of offshore oil. All of which was accompanied by the usual partisan furies: Obama's an empty suit, Republicans would raise an oil derrick on Teddy Roosevelt's head at Mt. Rushmore, etc.
The eagerness to put Obama's remark through the meat grinder of literalness, and the glee with which the McCain campaign mocked the suggestion -- staffers whipped up pocket air gauges labeled "Obama's Energy Plan" -- proves only one thing: When it comes to politics, conservation doesn't sell. Many Americans are allergic to the suggestion that they should change behavior or moderate consumption, particularly when it comes to their automobiles.
"Obama is to tire gauages [sic] what Jimmy Carter is to sweaters," fumed "Geevill" on ABC News' Political Radar blog.
I am delighted to have lived to see the humble tire gauge elevated to cultural lightning rod. I own several. If I may, some observations from the valve stem:
It is not easy to maintain optimum tire pressure. Full-service gas stations are largely a memory, which means drivers must do it for themselves. Ordinarily, if they think of it at all, they'll top off their tires with air at one of those coin-operated compressors with the sliding gauge in the nozzle. Two problems arise: First, you shouldn't pressurize your tires when they are warm, but measure the pressure in the morning when the tires are cool then add the appropriate amount of pressure when you get to a station. Second, the gauges in these self-serve air pumps are worthless. They never get calibrated and get kicked around, run over and abused.
