(No jokes about making the trains run on time. I asked Robert to write this for us back on Friday, before I had any idea how the focus of the weekend would unfold. Think instead of a multi-track strategy. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Last Thursday President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced the DOT's high speed rail strategic plan. You can find the full details of the plan at the USDOT website. The announcement has gotten a lot of attention around the blogs and in the traditional media, but what does it actually mean? What will this do for high speed rail in America, and what are some of the political obstacles that remain in place before we can use this tried-and-true system as a solution to our transportation, energy, environmental, and economic problems?
The short answer is that President Obama's plans have the potential to provide a major and long-overdue boost to the effort to build high speed trains across America. And he appears genuine in his desire to see this through, unlike the last Democratic president. But Obama is going to come up against some persistent and difficult obstacles, and he will have to show strong leadership and a willingness to make some people unhappy if he's to ensure that his presidency finally produces high speed trains for America.
(Robert's an historian who blogs at Calitics. This analysis of what's happening in the Golden State is very much in the way of the shape of things to come, as our minority majority status makes us a vanguard of the pluralistic demographic majority Chris has been writing about for years. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Today's Paul Krugman column exploring the apparent end of Republican racial backlash politics has been getting some excellent commentary across the blogosphere, including thereisnospoon's excellent take at Daily Kos:
For the longest time, the progressive economic agenda was held hostage to vaguely economically progressive but socially retrograde racist Dixiecrats in the South. When truly progressive economics required that all our nation's people have equal opportunity to share in the nation's wealth, those erstwhile allies became strained or broken. But today Democrats are no longer dependent on the likes of Zell Miller and his Dixiecratic friends to enact a progressive economic agenda. The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner as the Party of the South, and Democrats have largely cleaned our own house of the racists.
All that leaves for us is the question of whether enough of our Democratic officials will recover from their Battered Wife Syndrome and the reject the temptations of corporate corruption to truly herald the advent of a 2nd New Deal.
Krugman and spoon's points are especially applicable to California, where the Republican politics of backlash was born and perfected. From Reagan's 1966 campaign that took many white working class voters from Pat Brown and the Dems, to Howard Jarvis' 1978 Prop 13 campaign to cut taxes he argued were being misspent on people of color, to Pete Wilson's 1994 campaign won by scapegoating immigrants (also true of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 recall campaign, to a lesser extent) California Republican ideologies and political success have been built on exploiting white voters' resentments. As both Krugman and spoon point out, the base wanted the Great Society undone, and the real power in the Republican Party wanted to undo the New Deal.
As the state of California enters the most serious fiscal crisis in its 150-year history, it's worth looking at how the collapse of Republican backlash politics may provide the necessary opening to fix this state and move beyond 40 years of destructive and failed conservative ideology.
But what's really disturbing about this move is that it suggests the Sierra Club and the PCL have lost their focus - instead of looking at the big picture of high speed rail and emphasizing the game-changing environmental benefits it brings, they're focusing on a small non-issue instead. They've lost sight of the forest for the trees and instead of providing leadership on this issue they may instead cast their lot with the far right and leave Californians with no viable alternative to soaring fuel prices and a transportation system that is making our environmental problems far worse.
First, their criticisms as reported by E.J. Schulz:
But the environmentalists are still seething over the selection of relatively undeveloped Pacheco Pass as the route to connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area. They favor the more urban Altamont Pass to the north because they say it would induce less sprawl....
Environmentalists would rather see trains run farther north in the Valley before heading west so that more populated cities are served. They like the Altamont route because it would bring trains closer to Modesto, Dublin, Pleasanton and Livermore in the first phase.
By contrast, the Pacheco route -- roughly following Highway 152 -- is in a less populated area. Environmentalists worry that a planned station in Gilroy would induce sprawl in surrounding rural areas.
These worries are baseless. Gilroy and much of southern Santa Clara County have strict urban growth boundaries. If those places were going to sprawl they would have already done so given their proximity to the job center and hot housing market of Silicon Valley. HSR doesn't change that dynamic.
