"It's like they take pride in being ignorant"

Barack Obama talks about the Republican reaction to his suggestion that if everyone inflated their tires to the proper level it would save more oil than would be found in all the drilling in currently restricted areas that McCain has proposed.

I want to make a prediction about this. I don't know any more about this issue than what I read, see and hear in the news and on the internet, so I might be proved wrong here but I bet that the conservatives have reacted to this issue totally from their guts, before receiving any focus group or polling data on it. I predict that in a few days or weeks, their experts are going to be telling them to drop the whole thing like a hot potato.

One thing we have learned about conservatives during the last 8 years is that they think the idea of taking steps to use less energy, especially as an alternative to going out and finding more of it, is just totally wrong - weak, unmanly, stupid and (in the words of Newt Gingrich) loony tunes. But the vast majority of Americans who are not conservatives are environmentalists (to varying degrees) and are quite open to the idea of conserving and using less energy. Also most Americans hate waste and love efficiency -- conservatives, not so much.

So watch and see over the next few weeks and see if I am right. I predict that a month from now Republicans will be claiming they are the ones who advocated filling your tires and they gave out tire gauges to prove what good environmentalists they are.