Senator Obama's solution to high gas prices is telling Americans to make sure their tires are inflated.
-Rick Davis, McCain campaign manager
Keeping your tires inflated helps improve gas mileage. Even NASCAR advertises this fact. It's an imminently sensible thing to do. It's a personally responsible thing to do. Not only that but it could also save your life. Which makes what John McCain and crew are trying to push by mocking Barack Obama's suggestion that we monitor tire pressure not only childish, petty and obnoxiously misguided but downright dangerous.
Follow me after the jump for a personal take on tire pressure . . .
About five months ago my pregnant wife and I were traveling at about 70 miles an hour on I-65 headed north into Nashville. We had been noticing a strange shaking in our car as it approached higher speeds for about a week, and I had scheduled us to go in later that same week to have it checked out. I had been feeling a bit aprehensive about continuing to drive our vehicle in this state, but as we are a one-car family we had to keep driving, shaking and all, because we had no choice. So on that fateful afternoon all of the sudden without provocation: a loud BANG, the car began to shake violently to the point where my wife admitted later she could barely steer the car at all, and I panicked. In our first stroke of luck my wife, who is much more level-headed than I am, was driving at the time and quickly dropped our speed.
Now this particular stretch of I-65 has only intermittent shoulders of varying widths running alongside it. We were lucky a second time that we happened to find a rare refuge to which we could pull over on the left side of the highway and call AAA. I got out and examined the tire and it was completely shredded. As we were on the left side of the highway in the middle of a gradual leftward bend in the road, we then spent the next several hours watching cars, and visions of our lives, speed past us at 75+ mph. In our third stroke of luck none of them hit us. I was so concerned that I had my wife get into the car with me and we donned our seatbelts as we waited for AAA, just in case. AAA came with a truck that had lights and was big enough to shield the guy who was able to change our tire. You see I couldn't have changed the tire on the right side of the car with only 5 feet of pavement between me and the solid line.
To those who know me well, I sometimes can have a galling lack of common sense about everyday things like tire pressure, despite having majored in physics, and this instance was no exception. Keeping tires inflated, I learned that day, reduces wear and prevents blowouts and shredding. If we had been keeping our tire properly inflated by using the tire gauge my very practical father-in-law had given me last Christmas, we wouldn't have nearly been killed by almost losing control of our car on a busy highway. You better believe I check my tire pressure now.
So to John McCain and all of his cronies, SYFPH mocking tire pressure. Not only is it a common sense way to boost gas mileage, it might save a life. And to mock it is to denigrate safety for the sake of a cheap political point.
You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.