A smiling President Bush sat at the wheel of a test car in Lincoln, Neb., and gunned the engine, satisfied that the pollution-minded automobile would help him clean up America's dirty air.
"The proof's right here in the readout: the car runs cleaner on the ethanol mix," Bush told a gathering of 11,500 people afterwards at the University of Nebraska's packed Bob Devaney Sports Center.The president, who later returned to Washington, took the test drive and issued the report Tuesday, the final leg of two-day campaign on behalf of his sweeping plan to toughen the 1970 Clean Air Act.
Bush was meeting Wednesday with Jacques Delors, head of the European Economic Community, and afterward was focusing his attention on party politics by attending the GOP's annual President's Dinner, a gala fund-raiser.
After announcing his clean-air plan in Washington on Monday, Bush traveled to the snow-capped Grand Tetons in Wyoming and the University of Nebraska to push his proposal.
The president maintains that his plan would clear cities of smog, control and reduce cancer-causing emissions from factories and help protect all of North America of acid-rain pollution.
At the Grand Tetons on Tuesday, Bush called for an end of a logjam by special interests on Capitol Hill that has stopped any toughening of the Clean Air Act since 1977.
"We need action and we need it now," Bush told a gathering of several hundred people. "Every American has the right to breath clean air."
Much of Bush's plan focuses on the automobile, one of the nation's biggest polluters. It would require a 40 percent reduction in tailpipe emission of hydrocarbons by 1993.
For the nation's most polluted urban areas, Bush calls for a phasing in over 10 years of millions of cars that could run on "clean fuel" - methanol, natural gas or ethanol.
At the University of Nebraska, scientists are developing a car that runs on a new ethanol-blend.
Bush, with Nebraska Gov. Kay Orr at his side, rode twice around a test track in an ethanol-blend driven car, gunning the autombile on the second lap.
"I enjoyed the ride," Bush told the crowd at the Sports Center. "It has a lot of pickup - more than the 14,000 pound (presidential) limousine out there."