The award-winning sitcom “Veep” captured the incompetence and hubris of the inside-the-Beltway crowd in all its hilarious, foul-mouthed glory, and the fact that the policies that the characters pushed on the show were of the left is icing on the cake.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm looks and sounds like the perfect parody of government service, tailor-made for a show like “Veep.” Her earnest left-wing dogmatism and her efficient, no-nonsense short haircut give her an air of caricature or parody.
Granholm plays the part well, too. She’s one of those ivory-tower elites who think that everyone should just buy an expensive electric vehicle regardless of the strain that buying a car that on average costs $16,000 more than a gas-powered vehicle might put on a hardworking family’s budget. Her department also wants to regulate your gas stoves, ceiling fans, and water heaters as well. In other words, she’s a nanny-state know-it-all who thinks that the Executive Branch should run roughshod over the lives of everyday Americans.
Recently, Granholm put her money — or more accurately your taxpayer money — where her mouth is by taking her Democrat do-gooder show on the road. Granholm and her requisite staff, media hangers-on, and security went road-tripping from Charlotte, N.C., to Memphis, Tenn., ostensibly to show us rubes in the South that we should take our medicine in the form of overpriced EVs.
The four-day trip became the stuff of sitcom gold. I bet the writers of “Veep” are kicking themselves for not thinking of this scenario a few years ago.
Related: EVs Are Awesome Except When They Break Down and There’s No One to Fix Them
NPR reported that Granholm began by condescending to us backward Southerners with our F-150s and Jeeps that if we all buy EVs, we’ll be on the cutting edge of innovation:
On town hall stops along her road trip, Granholm made a passionate, optimistic case for this transition. She often put up a photo of New York City in 1900, full of horses and carriages, with a single car. Then another slide: “Thirteen years later, same street. All these cars. Can you spot the horse?”
One horse was in the frame.
“Things are happening fast. You are in the center of it. Imagine how big clean energy industries will be in 13 years,” she told one audience in South Carolina. “How much stronger our economy is going to grow. How many good-paying jobs we’re going to create — and where we are going to lead the world.”
NPR reporter Camila Domonoske gushed about how the former Michigan governor “helped rescue the auto industry during the 2008 global financial crisis.” My head hurts from rolling my eyes.
But the whole roadshow went schadenfreudelicious when Granholm’s caravan, which included “a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150, and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle” — along with Secret Service in those evil gas-guzzlers — stopped in Grovetown, Ga., a suburb of Augusta.
The cohort of condescension stopped at a charging station and immediately ran into issues. One of the chargers at that location was broken, and others were in use. So, just as naturally as one would expect, the advance team pulled into the one charging station that wasn’t occupied to prepare for Granholm’s arrival — because as we all know, our government betters take priority over the peons.
The vehicle that Granholm’s team used to save the space was one of the gas-powered SUVs. Nothing to see here, folks. But one couple with a baby in an EV that needed charging got upset that the gas-guzzler was in a space they could use, so they called the police.
Now, in Georgia, it’s not illegal to park a gas-powered vehicle in an EV charging space, which means that the police couldn’t do anything about it. (Although I can imagine Granholm’s handlers being jerks to local officers.) The Granholm team tried to smooth the situation over, “including sending other vehicles to slower chargers until both the frustrated family and the secretary had room to charge.” I can actually picture the harried staffers on “Veep” bumbling around trying to make an incident like this one go away.
Once the Great Grovetown Charger Debacle resolved itself, the tour went on as planned, and I have no doubt that Granholm and the rest of the Biden administration hailed the publicity stunt as a flaming success. But what the tour actually did was prove that America isn’t ready to go all-electric and won’t be anytime soon.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: beyond the plethora of obvious problems with all-electric vehicles, the lack of long-trip range and dearth of charging stations is going to make it difficult for many people to switch to EVs. No matter what Granholm wishes were true, America can’t go electric for many years, maybe decades, to come.
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