I, like everybody else, couldn't help but feel excited by Obama's sort-of-victory speech last night, just like I couldn't help beaming ESP-messages toward the sort-of-confirmed-but-maybe-not-really-til-Denver Democratic presidential nominee DO NOT ASK HER TO BE YOUR VP PLEASE NO PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE NO. At the start of this nomination process I admired Hillary Clinton and thought she'd make a good president. Now I just want her to go away. PLEASE MAKE HER GO AWAY. I could get into specifics that explain my reasons for feeling this way, but why, when it can all be summed up by four words. She exudes bad vibes. PLEASE GO AWAY.
OK, enough with the all-caps.
Even with all that excitement, however, I am puzzled by the absence-of-play given to yesterday's comments by General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner:
"In the last quarter of last year, we sold on average 102,000, 105,000 large pickups and utilities per month," Wagoner said. "Over the last few months that has dropped to 65,000 units... We at GM don't think this is a spike or temporary shift: we believe that it is, by and large, permanent."
The CEO of General Motors, a guy you could call the Grand High Pubah of Really Big Vehicles, just said he thought the North American marketplace had shifted from buying SUVs and trucks to smaller, more gas-friendly cars... permanently. And the New York Times didn't put this on the front page. The Globe and Mail did, but it led with a couple of paragraphs about the negative economic effects of the job losses. Actually, they led with CAW chief Buzz Hargrove complaining about the job losses.
"We are not going to allow this to happen," Buzz said. "... We have power and we're going to use every bit of it."
Which just sounds silly. Why lead with such silly comments? The issue here is the price of gas, which has doubled in this province in the last six or so years. Doubled! And it's as bad if not worse everywhere else in the U.S. and Canada. How can Buzz Hargrove do anything about that? Job losses are sad, I mean, I know that, they are disemboweling my hometown of Windsor, Ontario, but the real news here is that the GM CEO believes that gas prices and an overall trend toward environmentally less-harmful products is shifting consumer demand toward smaller vehicles. In other words, North America's addiction to huge vehicles... MAY BE OVER. (Sorry about the all-caps, again. BUT THIS IS HUGE.)
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