PPI Contributing Expert Mark Reutter is interviewed by NPR’s Greg Allen for All Things Considered about President Obama’s announcement in Florida of stimulus funds for high-speed rail projects.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
In case you missed it, here are Progressive Fix’s highlights from the past week:
The choice that the Obama administration and Congress face is simple: modest incrementalism versus a truly transformative vision. The administration’s commitment to fund high-speed rail is a step in the right direction, but it’s not the end of the process. Read more…
Real change in Washington cannot happen as long as corporations and other special interests dominate the debate on Capitol Hill and exercise undue influence over who runs for, and wins, public office. The Fair Elections Now Act offers our best chance at fixing our broken politics. Read more…
Working with the most vile members of the Taliban is a great temptation, but will prove a fool’s errand. Read more…
Mark Reutter in Time:
Still, the initial round of $8 billion — which Biden referred to as “seed money” during his remarks in Tampa — is just a tiny percentage of what it would cost to significantly overhaul the country’s rail system. And there are concerns that by spreading the funds to so many different projects in so many different states, it won’t be possible to make a real difference in any one place, as Mark Reutter wrote in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute. It doesn’t help that the one region that could most obviously benefit from truly high-speed rail — the Boston-to-Washington corridor — received a mere $112 million in funding, in part because building new track in the congested area would be prohibitively expensive and politically challenging.
So lots of Americans, we are told, really wish the president would reach out to the Republican Party and come up with bipartisan solutions for our nation’s problems. This very day, the president is in fact trudging up to Baltimore to attend a retreat of the House Republican Caucus, an organization devoted to his complete political destruction.
But before anyone gets agitated about “bipartisan solutions” or the failure to achieve them, it’s important to take a look at where Republicans actually are on big controversial issues–like, just to pull one example out of the air, health care policy.
At the New Republic today, Washington & Lee University law professor Timothy gives us a refresher course on GOP health care policy, from AHiPs to interstate insurance sales. He concludes their proposals wouldn’t do a whole lot for the uninsured, the insured, or health care costs and federal spending. But the most important conclusion he reaches is that there simply isn’t a lot of “common ground” on which to build any sort of bipartisan compromise.
The two parties presently come at the issue in fundamentally different ways, with Republicans, in particular, being transfixed by the desire to encourage the purchase of individual health insurance policies, if not individual purchases of health care without insurance.
Maybe the president and House Republicans can find plenty to talk about in Baltimore today. But comparing notes on health reform is probably a waste of time.
This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.
President Obama flew down to Tampa, Florida, yesterday to wield his stimulus bat for “transformative” passenger train development and struck a mighty bunt for high-speed rail.
All the hoopla by the administration (e.g., DOT Secretary Ray LaHood describing the $8 billion in grants as “an absolute game-changer in American transportation”) doesn’t change the fact that of the 29 projects awarded, only two – in Florida and California – qualify as high-speed rail by world standards.
Call the rest by what they really are – “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time-performance rail.” The best of those projects, a $1.1 billion upgrade of the existing rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, will permit Amtrak trains to achieve 110-mph maximums and 70-mph averages between the two cities – far below the 125-200 mph standard set by the International Union of Railways.
Several corridor projects funded yesterday won’t even achieve 100-mph speed maximums because they are limited by the curves and grades of existing railroad rights of way that cannot easily, or cheaply, be modified for HSR service.
Let’s look first at the two projects that PPI recently argued should have served as templates for the administration’s HSR program.
Florida may actually get by 2015 what is running daily in Europe and Asia – “bullet trains” on dedicated track that rocket between major cities. The administration awarded the Florida Department of Transportation $1.25 billion to start a long-planned line between Tampa, Lakeland, Disney World and Orlando. Utilizing a new right of way and electrically propelled trainsets, the line is expected to operate at 168-mph top speed. Construction of the railway later this year would employ at least 15,000 workers.
But with the apparent aim of spreading stimulus cash to all corners of the country, the administration handed Florida less than half of the $2.6 billion needed to complete the 88-mile line. It is unclear how this funding gap will be overcome. One possibility is that Florida will receive funds from the $2.5 billion in HSR projects allocated by Congress for fiscal year 2010.
California’s HSR project was the other big winner yesterday, with $2.25 billion (of $4.7 billion requested) to purchase land and complete environmental reviews for a 200-mph line between San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco/Sacramento. The overall cost for this project is estimated at around $50 billion. Even though California voters approved the sale of $9 billion in bonds for construction, the project needs a lot more money to come to fruition. Does the Obama administration have a plan to make sure the project is sustainable over the long term and that some segments are opened for revenue service in the near term?
If properly funded, the Florida and California projects hold promise of starting a true HSR infrastructure, with all of the economic and environmental benefits described in the PPI policy memo. But instead of insisting on advanced rail technology elsewhere, the Obama administration has settled for modest state projects with humble goals.
Take the $598 million awarded to the states of Washington and Oregon to add sidings and improve signaling on the rail line between Seattle and Portland, which is owned jointly by freight carriers Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe.
The administration’s fact sheet reports that passenger train travel time “will be reduced by at least 5 percent and on-time performance will increase substantially, from 62 to 88 percent.” Currently, Amtrak trains require 3½ hours to cover the 186 miles, a pokey 53 mph average. Reducing train time by 5 percent means saving all of 10 minutes.
Likewise, the $400 million in stimulus funds going to establish train service between Cleveland and Cincinnati would permit “speeds of up to 79 mph,” according to the administration’s fact sheet, while track upgrades between Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., will “increase top train speeds to 90 mph.”
There is no doubt that President Obama is committed to upgrading intercity passenger rail. But yesterday he placed his feet squarely in both the visionary camp and the slow-speed Amtrak camp, spreading federal funds far and wide rather than focusing on two or three corridors that would give us trains equal to those in Europe and China.
Mark Reutter’s report cited by the Associated Press:
The only U.S. project planned for a train speed around 200 mph is California’s 800-mile-corridor tying Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay area to Los Angeles and San Diego, which received a $2.3 billion grant. Florida’s Tampa-to-Orlando trains, the next fastest project to win a grant, will reach a top speed of 150 mph, but average just 86 mph. Eventually the system could reach speeds around 180 mph when the line is extended to Miami, but only if decisions are made now to spend more money on designs and equipment compatible with faster technology.
By comparison, France’s Lorraine-Champagne line averages 169 mph and Japan’s Hioshima-Kokura line averages 159 mph, according to a report by the Progressive Policy Institute.
The only high-speed rail line in the United States is Amtrak’s Acela, which reaches 150 mph, but only briefly. It averages 67 mph between Boston and New York and 77 mph between New York and Washington. Most other intercity passenger trains in the U.S. share tracks with diesel or hybrid diesel-electric freight trains, which travel at speeds of 79 mph or less.
Many conservatives hoped last night’s State of the Union Address would represent something of a white flag from President Obama. Some progressives hoped for a fiery, “populist” attack on malefactors of great wealth. Others yearned for rhetorical enchantment, a speech that would redefine messy contemporary debates according to some previously unarticulated transcendent logic.
The president did none of those things. He essentially doubled down on the policy course he had already charted, made a serious effort to re-connect it to the original themes of his presidential campaign, and sought to brush back his critics a bit. In purely political terms, the speech seemed designed to halt the panic and infighting in Democratic ranks, kick some sand in the faces of increasingly smug and scornful Republicans, and obtain a fresh hearing from the public for decisions he made at the beginning of last year if not earlier. It was, as virtually every one I spoke to last night spontaneously observed, a very “Clintonian” effort, and not just because it was long and comprehensive. It strongly resembled a couple of those late 1990s Clinton SOTUs organized on the theme of “progress not partisanship,” loaded with data points supporting the sheer reasonableness of the administration agenda and the pettiness of (unnamed) conservative foes.
Substantively, the speech broke little new ground. But while such “concessions” to “conservative ideas” as highlighting business tax cuts in the jobs bill, or making nuclear energy development part of a “clean energy” strategy, were decided on some time ago, they were probably news to many non-beltway listeners.
All in all, Obama used the SOTU as a “teachable moment” to refresh some old but important arguments. And he did that well: his reminder of Bush’s responsibility for most of the budget problems facing the country was deftly done, in the context of accepting responsibility for what’s happened fiscally on his own watch. He rearticulated once again the economic rationale for his health care and climate change initiatives, a connection that was reinforced by the subordinate placement of these subjects in the speech. And he conducted something of a mini-tutorial on the budget, and cleared up most of the misunderstandings created by his staff’s use of the word “freeze” to describe a spending cap.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in the speech was his frontal attack on the five Supreme Court justices sitting a few yards from his podium, about the possible impact of last week’s Citizens United decision liberating corporate political spending. I only wish he could have amplified this section by quoting from Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s many hymns of praise for this disturbing opinion as a giant blow for free speech.
And that gets to my only real criticism of this well-planned SOTU: a lot of it was in code. A number of the digs at Republicans were clear to people who watch Washington closely, but not so much to people who don’t. For example, the president was clearly taunting congressional Republicans when he said he’d be glad to consider any ideas they had that met his list of criteria for health care reform. To someone watching who didn’t know how ridiculous contemporary conservative “thinking” on health care has become, this may have sounded less like a criticism than like a decision to reopen the whole issue to many more months of wrangling in Congress, even as he tried to urge congressional Democrats to get the job done and not “run for the hills.”
Yes, the president has to walk a fine line in dealing with public and media perceptions that both parties are equally responsible for “partisanship” and gridlock. But at some point between now and November, he needs to better connect the dots, and explain exactly whose “partisanship” is an obstacle to “progress.”
Update: Nate Silver did an analysis of “buzzwords” in Obama’s speech, comparing it to those of previous presidents at similar junctures in their administrations. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s most resembled those of Bill Clinton.
President Obama’s first State of the Union address was a surprisingly prosaic affair for a man of his oratorical gifts. It was practical, concrete, and workmanlike, long on common sense and short on inspiration.
Still, the speech probably advanced several of Obama’s key goals, and it gave the country a chance to see how well he stands up to political adversity. By turns humorous, passionate and resolute, Obama gave the impression of a more seasoned leader who has not been knocked off stride by recent reverses, and who is rededicating himself to changing the way Washington works.
On the positive side, Obama conveyed empathy with working Americans who have lost jobs, houses and retirement savings, and reassured them that he will put jobs and economic recovery first in 2010. He identified with their anger over government’s rescue of the financial sector – “we all hated the bank bailout” — and reeled off a list of small-bore initiatives to boost small businesses and help middle-class families pay for childcare, retirement and college.
Although his major reforms — health care, financial regulation, the climate and energy bill – seem stalled, the President vowed to stay the course. In fact, he deftly parried conservative depictions of these as big government or archliberal initiatives, defining them instead as integral to the mission he was elected to accomplish: changing Washington’s dysfunctional political culture.
Crucially, Obama sought to resurrect his image as an outsider and insurgent bent of tackling America’s polarized and broken politics. He spoke of the “deficit of trust” in government and vowed to reduce the power of lobbyists and special interests, though was uncharacteristically vague on how he’d do that.
The president also seems to have recognized that, to win back disaffected independents, he will have to confront the forces of inertia in his own party as well as his political opponents. He issued a pointed challenge to liberals not to resist his efforts to impose fiscal discipline on the federal government, endorsed a deficit-reduction commission and threatened to veto profligate spending measures. And he bluntly called out Republicans for their blind obstructionism, adding that their ability to block legislation carries with it the responsibility to help solve the nation’s problems.
The most disappointing part of Obama’s address was on international affairs, a subject he finally turned to about an hour into his speech. The president duly noted that he is waging the fight against al Qaeda aggressively and sending more troops to Afghanistan. But he had little to say about the nature of the struggle that America is waging, at great sacrifice, against Islamist extremism. He seemed more passionate in affirming his pledge to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq, but said little about what they have achieved there, or whether our country has any interest in what happens there after we leave.
All in all, the president seemed to treat consequential matters of war, terrorism and foreign relations generally as an afterthought. This may suit the public’s present mood, but it didn’t reveal much about how this president connects America’s purposes abroad to what he wants to achieve at home.
And this underscores what was perhaps most striking about the speech. There was very little by way of an overarching vision or governing philosophy to link together the president’s many initiatives and commitments. There was no striking image like Reagan’s “shining city on the hill,” or thematic scaffolding like Bill Clinton’s “opportunity, responsibility and community” to invest Obama’s tenure with a deeper logic than serial problem-solving. Yes, Obama in his peroration repeatedly invoked “American values,” in an almost generic way. What’s still missing after a year in office is the master narrative of the Obama presidency, a story that is less about him and more about the next stage in America’s democratic experiment.
