“I don’t think they picked me because they thought I’d be that great a transportation person,” Mr. LaHood says with refreshing indifference as to how this admission might play if, say, he were ever to bungle a bridge collapse.
Refreshing? Are you freaking kidding me? That’s almost as bad as this:
…one of the astonishing things about Mr. LaHood, 63, is how limited his transportation résumé is, how little excitement he exudes on the subject (other than about high-speed rail) and how little he seems to care who knows it.
The profile gets more positive from there, but it is disappointing. It seems that in both the Bush and Obama administrations, the transportation department has been given short shrift. Our national infrastructure is rapidly becoming outdated. Isn’t it time we started to care?
I wouldn’t say it was totally given short shrift under Bush. I mean, his Secretary of Transportation until 2006 was Norman Mineta, who’d had Oberstar’s job as head of the House Public Works and Transportation committee for a few years in the early 90s (ISTEA was passed on his watch) and had been chair of both the Surface and Aviation subcommittees before that. So, Bush’s first SecTrans - who brought the department some nice stability by being its longest serving Secretary - was the guy who’d been chair of the committee that turned out the first heavily intermodal transportation funding bill of the 20th Century. He was also a strong proponent of ITS, another plus for him. I wouldn’t say the department was really given short shrift under him. True, Bush may have seen Transportation as such an unimportant department he could waste it on a display of bipartisanship, but I don’t think that’s the case: other departments would’ve made more sense ideologically, and he wouldn’t have kept Mineta so long were that the case. Plus, even if he did intend that (which I don’t think he did), he didn’t pick a loser.
Yes, SAFETEA-LU took several years too long to pass, and the dozen-odd extensions after TEA-21 expired were a pain in the ass and problematic, but I don’t think that can fairly be blamed on the Bush administration. That was 100% Congress’s doing, because highway funding’s an issue that doesn’t have party lines, it has state lines. Very few states have a common interest when it comes to transportation, which means 50 variations on “Hell no, we aren’t doing that!” when it comes to writing and voting on legislation.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say Mineta was a bad guy, either. The real problem I had was in changing FTA rules so much that it made projects race-to-the-bottom to be eligible for funding. See: half-distance northstar, 2 train hiawatha, etc.
Despite Ray LaHood’s lack of experience with transportation, this was a fairly good pick in my mind. It’s important to think about why Obama would pick him and also who is in place underneath LaHood. The second in command is one of the visionaries for the future of transportation and LaHood has the connections and the relationship with the Republican’s to get some of these bolder changes passed. Personally, I wanted Reps. Oberstar or Blumenauer, but in hindsight I think this was a pretty great move. There is no animosity towards LaHood, whereas sometimes Oberstar is treated as a bit of a kook on transportation because of some of his pie-in-the-sky plans. Having Sec. LaHood allows Reps. Oberstar and Blumenauer to play their stated roles as the pushers of ideas, which can immediately be followed by Sec. LaHood working to get the deals done in Congress.