Copyright by John T. Reed

Barack Obama is unqualified, incompetent, and inexperienced; a rookie at everything, and untrained for anything other than teaching law courses. He has spent more taxpayers’ money than all previous presidents combined after only 100 days in office. He has set in motion World War II-sized deficits and national debt. People around the world in the gold and currency markets are betting billions that his policies will cause imminent high inflation. He has promised to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq and adopted a Bush-like surge policy in Afghanistan after winning early presidential primaries as the anti-war, anti-Bush candidate.

Teflon

Yet through it all, he has an approval rating in the 60s percentage-wise. He is Teflon, too cool for school, untouchable, a rock star.

Why? Because the American people, or at least a majority of them, are ignorant dopes. Jay Leno and Sean Hannity often ask simple questions of passers by on city streets. Most reveal themselves to be comically uninformed. So they sure do not know or care anything about foreign policy, fiscal policy, monetary policy, defense policy, and so on. So Obama appears well on his way to bluffing his way through his entire administration and getting away with it.

You don’t want to go there, Barack

But then, he messed with people’s CARS AND PICKUPS!

Barack, Barack, Barack. Your airhead supporters either don’t understand all that policy stuff, or they don’t care, or, most likely, both. But Barack, baby, sweetheart, they DO understand cars. And you, Barack, will take their favorite cars and trucks away from Americans when you pry them from their cold, dead fingers!

In wonk speak

Thus far, they do not understand what you’ve done to cars because it has been reported in the newspapers they don’t read and on the TV news programs they don’t watch in wonkish code like CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, cap and trade, climate change, carbon footprint, greenhouse gases, green cars, and all that politician gibberish.

35 miles per gallon

Obama’s CAFE standards says that U.S. car makers must have a fleet average miles per gallon of 35.5 by 2016. (I guess that is during his final year in office when he can’t run for re-election if he gets two terms. He’ll be on the way out of Dodge when the public finally figures out what he’s done to their cars, that having to drive American-made Yugos turned out to be the “change they could believe in.”)

No magic motors

The average two-digit-IQ American thinks the CAFE standards will be met by the invention of magic motors that enable them to still drive their 4,000-pound SUV—only getting 35 miles a gallon in the process.

It doesn’t work that way. The Laws of Physics get in the way. You achieve 35 miles per gallon mainly by eliminating weight. You do that by making the car and all of its components, especially the engine, smaller. (For what little it’s worth, I took one semester of automotive engineering in college.)

Higher death toll

Someone has calculated that the incremental number of people who will die each year on America’s highways because of driving smaller, 35-MPG cars will exceed the total number of American military killed in Iraq so far. (I guess you could do that by projecting the small, 35-MPG-car type fatality rate to a much larger number of such cars being driven. Also, the death rate for cars of that size would likely go up because different, less careful types of people would be driving them when Obama forces them on us.)

Your future OBAMAmobile

What does this mean to people who get all their news from You Tube? They have to drive one of the following or a car like it:

• 2009 Volkswagen Jetta (4-cylinder manual transmission)
• 2009 Nissan Altima hybrid (4-cylinder transmission)
• 2009 Volkswagen Jetta sportwagen (4-cylinder manual transmission)
• 2009 Toyota Camry hybrid (4-cylinder automatic transmission)

The above four cars each get 34 miles per gallon according to the EPA. They and the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid were the only cars in 2009 that came close to meeting Obama’s new CAFE standards.

Pay for two engines and extra batteries

A hybrid is a car with two engines—one gasoline and one electric—and a whole bunch of batteries. Because of the extra engine and batteries, they cost a lot more than a comparable size gasoline-only car. A USA Today story said you would have to drive your car tens of thousands of miles or gas would have to go up to $5.60 per gallon in order for you to save in gasoline costs the extra amount you have to pay to buy the hybrid car up front. In other words, you will be worse off financially after five years of owning and filling up your hybrid than if you had bought a comparable, lower miles-per-gallon gas-only car.

Then there is the fact that while claiming he does not want to run the car companies, Obama has taken over two of the car companies: GM and Chrysler. That means you will have to go farther to find a dealer to buy or service a GM or Chrysler. There will be fewer dealers to get comparison shopping prices so you will likely have less bargaining power and therefore pay a higher price. They are also eliminating most of the models they were making in 2008.

GM is selling Hummer to Sichuan Tengzhong (that’s the company name) of Chengdu, China, a maker of heavy industrial machinery.

‘Vegan’ cars

Which brands will still be available is not yet announced, but given Obama’s preference for green, high-miles-per-gallon cars, one suspects that you will not be able to buy, or will have trouble buying, a new SUV, van, Corvette, pickup truck, Suburban, convertible, Camaro, 8-cylinder anything, Malibu, Impala, BMW, Infiniti, Cadillac, “muscle” car (“vegan” cars only under Obama management—likely model name: The Arugula), or Pontiac (terminated).

We may become like Cuba where astonishingly old—like 60 years—American cars are still on the roads because Cuba has no auto industry and is too poor to import new cars. They are still operating the cars they had when Castro took over. Americans will lovingly care for pre-Obama cars. Businesses will spring up to help them.

I would also expect small, unregulated-by-CAFE-standards companies will be created to make the cars that Detroit and foreign makers will not be allowed to make, call them “The Coca-Cola Classic of cars and trucks.” In terms of mileage, pollution, and all that, this will go against Obama’s environmentalist goals.

The history of convertibles

Remember what happened to convertibles?

In 1976 Cadillac sold the Eldorado as “The last convertible in America.” Then they discontinued it. All other American companies had previously stopped making convertibles. You could not buy any new American convertibles the following year and for some time thereafter. Then a funny thing happened. Small companies started chopping the tops off brand new cars and turning them into convertibles one at a time, like van-conversion companies that outfit the inside of vans with chairs and beds and all that.

Finally, Detroit decided to go “back by popular demand” into the convertible business.

The ‘New Coke of cars’

OBAMAmobiles will be the “New Coke of cars,” the MacLean Deluxe of vehicles, the twenty-first century equivalent of the disastrous Ford Edsel (1958-60—described as “looking like an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”), more like your 16-year old niece’s Smart Car than “your father’s Oldsmobile.”

Hey, why don’t we declare war on Russia and the U.S.?

Obama and his staff are supposed to be brilliant politicians. They won as he likes to point out. Obama and his advisors know not to mess with people’s guns. Well, then why are they dumb enough to mess with people’s cars? Almost everyone has a car. Lots of people do not have guns. Not smart, Barack. Sort of like Hitler deciding in 1941, when he had conquered almost all of western Europe, to invade his then ally, the Soviet Union, and declare war on the U.S.

Union guy

The media are currently running stories about the good old days with regard to American cars. Eventually, the public is going to figure out that Obama had a big hand in this. He’s not a car guy. If he had a car, it was probably a Prius. (A reader said it was a Chrysler 300. If so, where was his devotion to energy independence and global warming? Or his cool guy taste?) He’s a union guy. But he failed to think it through enough to see that giving $100 billion of taxpayers’ borrowed money to his United Auto Workers supporters meant messing with people’s cars.

Big mistake, Barack.

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm– but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
T.S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party, p.111)