At a town hall meeting in Berea , Ohio, today, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, pushed back against the GOP attack on his advice to a voter last week that having a tuned up car and fully inflated tires would help save energy.
"Let me make a point about efficiency, because my Republican opponents - they don’t like to talk about efficiency," Obama said.
"You know the other day I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars and a new electricity grid and somebody said, 'well, what can I do? what can individuals do?' Obama recalled.
"So I told them something simple," Obama said. "I said, 'You know what? You can inflate your tires to the proper levels and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil we'd get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there, or wherever he was going to drill.'"
(Note: that's not accurate, as we fact-checked last week. But the larger point about energy savings is correct.)
"So now the Republicans are going around - this is the kind of thing they do. I don't understand it! They’re going around, they're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is 'Barack Obama's energy plan.'
"Now two points, one, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they're making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.
"You know, they think it is funny that they are making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework. Because this is serious business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference."
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