This Week's Fight: Energy

Barack Obama is up with a very tough hit on McCain:

Meanwhile, Obama (who turns 47 today) is giving a major address on energy in Lansing, with the news being that he is calling for tapping 70 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve--a reversal of his previous opposition. Over the weekend, Obama also shifted on the issue of offshore drilling. Though his is not quite the reversal we saw from John McCain some weeks back, the Democratic nominee now says he would be open to additional drilling, if it were part of a bipartisan compromise that also included higher fuel efficiency standards and the development of alternative sources of energy. (Recent polls suggest Americans overwhelmingly support more drilling.)

This morning, the McCain campaign and the RNC have been handing out tire gauges as a way of mocking Obama's suggestion that Americans could save as much energy by tuning up their cars and properly inflating their tires as they would get from offshore drilling. As for the actual merits of that proposal, Jake Tapper and Natalie Gewargis at ABC tested it out, and discovered that it could save 800,000 barrels a day -- not as much as drilling would produce, but not an insignificant amount.