It’s getting harder and harder to tell the real John Kerry (assuming for a moment that there is a real John Kerry) from the pathetic “I voted for it before I voted against it” caricature portrayed in the Bush ads.
If the following performance were the creation of Republican ad men (was it?), there would be howls of protest. Now I assume there are merely howls.
PITTSBURGH – Does John Kerry, who supports higher automobile fuel economy standards, own a gas-guzzling SUV? There is one in the family, but Kerry said it’s not his.
During a conference call Thursday with reporters to discuss his upcoming jobs tour through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, the Democratic presidential candidate was asked whether he owned a Chevrolet Suburban.
“I don’t own an SUV,” said Kerry, who supports increasing existing fuel economy standards to 36 miles per gallon by 2015 in order to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil supplies.
….
Kerry thought for a second when asked whether his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, had a Suburban at their Ketchum, Idaho, home. Kerry said he owns and drives a Dodge 600 and recently bought a Chrysler 300M. He said his wife owns the Chevrolet SUV.
“The family has it. I don’t have it,” he said.
The Suburban aside, he’s right. He doesn’t have it.
A bizarre comment, but one that will please a certain constituency.
The “marriage is good for gays, but a sign of intellectual backwardness in straights, crowd will love Kerry’s attempt to say that he’s married, but he’s not really married in the traditional sense. Hidden message: Kerry is not one of those Neanderthals who actually expects his wife to be… a wife.
Unbelievable. How much longer does he honestly think he can get away with this crap? He was MORE than happy to take the $6 million loan on his “share” of the Heinz-Kerry abode on Beacon Hill. But the eeeeee-vil SUV, that’s “family” property, not his.
So, Teresa’s assets are “hers” if they might hurt your candidacy, but anything that can benefit you financially is 50% “yours”, is that how it works, John? You wouldn’t be trying to have it both ways now, would you?
Hypocrisy aside, look at his position on fuel economy.
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Excellent angle on that, Richard. Accepting blame for a policy thus-failed would be akin to disproving today the dangers of global warming 1,000 years off being foretold by the enviro-whackjobs.
Did that come out right? Cheers.
Unfortunately, Bush has issued similar orders and proposals, such as one which requires diesel pollution to be dramatically reduced by 2014 and another which would curtail power plant emissions by 2018. Clinton enacted diesel fuel regulations which set the date of compliance at 2010.
Quite a scam all around.
That may be true, Nels, but it is the Democrats who claim to be the real environmentalists. For example, when it comes to morality, supposedly a Republican issue, it is only the Republicans who are ridiculed for immoral behavior.
To be fair, some of these mandates need a long lead time. GHW Bush’s Clean Air Act of 1990, for example, had some far-reaching deadlines. The reason was that the technology for meeting the standards had to be developed and the industry had to budget the expense to implement it. At that time I worked for Velsicol Chemical Company, and I knew that they took it as a challenge to cut their emissions by the required percentage well ahead of the deadline; but they were doing well financially at the time, otherwise they couldn’t have managed it. Shorter deadlines would mean poor compliance, a blow to the economy (or at least the sub-economy of the affected businesses), or a meaningless reform.
The reason was that the technology for meeting the standards had to be developed
Which is exactly the wrong thing to do. It you mandate the use of a non-existent technology the results will not be good. A simple way of increasing gas mileage is to make cars lighter. Of course, that makes the cars less safe. So we end up trading off lives for better fuel economy. Only government regulators could believe that is the correct way to solve the problem.
Making cars less safe is a quick fix. The reason for the long lead time is to develop better ways to increase gas milage. I’m not saying it’s definitely going to happen that way, but if you want to increase fuel efficiency without sacrificing safety, you have to allow enough time to develop the technology.
Speaking for myself only, I’d be glad to see all #^$% SUVs banned. I hate driving around them, and I hate it when they park next to me and so totally block my view that I take my life in my hands just to drive away from Walgreens. People used to manage without them – what’s changed?
The thing here is not that jfk 2.0 is hypocritical (or ignorant of community property laws), it is that he seems to have so thoroughly internalized the idea that all those rules and PC things only apply to the peasants, such that he need not deign to concern himself with them. How do these mega-rich elitists fit in the Democratic Party – the party of the common working featherless biped – anyway?
The reason for the long lead time is to develop better ways to increase gas mileage.
Laura, I agree with you that it will take time. Where I disagree with you is the notion that it is possible to set a fixed date in the future when the problem will be solved. If government were really interested in increasing the efficiency of cars they would pay for the research. As soon as an effective technology was developed it could be implemented. That would be a rational approach, but it would not address the political aspect of the problem. The so-called environmentalists would attach them for not doing anything. Thus, they
Laura, you’re right, I hadn’t considered that industry needs considerable time to budget the changes necessary to comply with the regulations. I’m not very familiar with the types of fuel and pollution standards laws we have at present, so this may already be in place, but what about having incentives for industry to increase efficiency and decrease pollution, without attaching penalties or timetables?
For example, Bush or Kerry could propose a graduated scale of sizeable tax breaks for manufacturers, tied to mileages between the present standard and some far-off goal like 50 mpg. If progress could not be made to increase mileage, or consumers were not buying fuel efficient vehicles, manufacturers would not receive the tax breaks but neither would they be penalized. If particular manufacturers developed better technology, even if the advancements were small, and managed to sell these new cars to consumers, they’d receive tax breaks or other bonuses. But there would be no dates involved; just a standing policy which any car manufacturer could take advantage of at any time (of course the sooner they improved mileage the sooner they’d receive the tax breaks).
This way politicians wouldn’t be able to push the day-of-reckoning onto their successors, plus it would seem to encourage competition between manufacturers.
Without deadlines, too often nothing ever happens. As for incentives, I believe they are in place. As long as enough people have to have their honkin’ big SUVs, it’s more profitable for the car manufacturers to forego the incentives. For a free market person like myself, it’s tempting to say OK then. But I’ve spent enough years in the environmental business to internalize the fact that we all breathe the same air and drink the same water, and we do have a right to try to protect those things. The willingness of a company to keep paying fines because it’s easier on their bottom line than to stop polluting does not protect those things. The profit motive just doesn’t apply here, sorry, Ayn.
“If government were really interested in increasing the efficiency of cars they would pay for the research. As soon as an effective technology was developed it could be implemented.” I am enough of a free market person to hate that idea. Private industry can do this much better. And I’d rather the people who buy GMC cars pay for GMC’s research, not my tax dollars.
“If government were really interested in increasing the efficiency of cars they would pay for the research. As soon as an effective technology was developed it could be implemented.” I am enough of a free market person to hate that idea.
I was not advocating this approach. I was just trying to point out the fallacy of setting an arbitrary deadline and expecting a solution to the problem to magically appear at that time. When you do that you are in danger of getting a solution like the one I gave before of cutting the weight of the car to improve mileage efficiency. That WAS done and the result was a higher death rate. In other words, if government mandates something without worrying about the negative effects of meeting that requirement you get unintended consequences. I don
Oops!
“Why can’t that teenager and their parents be able to go down there and find the kind of car that…