Let me finish with the failure of our leaders to lead.
Am I the only one who sees the immense opportunity for getting things done in this country if only our political leaders would learn how to be politicians again?
I look at the big table of opportunities for this country to move ahead and wonder why our political leaders can’t find trades and deals to make.
The Democrats desperately want to get the government back into the building business — especially on transportation.
Who exactly is against transportation? Is there some senator or member of Congress who wants dangerous bridges, who’s happy with trains that shake, rattle and roll, that ramble along like a farmer’s buckboard? Like the Acela between D.C. and New York?
Is anyone happy that Memorial Bridge, which we marched across in the March on the Pentagon in 1967 against the Vietnam War, is crumbling?
Does anyone wish that President Eisenhower had not built the interstate highway system that unites this country — Route 95 that cuts north and south, Route 70 and Route 80, that cut across the continent uniting east and west?
Isn’t there a way in all the clatter of opportunities (the trade bill, a minimum wage hike, Keystone, infrastructure spending) that grown-ups can find ways to jam things together and make a go of it? Does everything have to die in the logjam? Does everything we need to get done need to rot on the tracks? Is everything about killing something, like Obamacare?
Can’t the pols find a way to get something done by letting some things live? Where are the LBJs, the Tip O’Neills the Bob Doles, the Bill Clintons? Lincoln built the transcontinental railway in the middle of the Civil War, the land-grant college system, and with it scientific agriculture, in the same war. I’m waiting for a presidential candidate of either party to propose a deal that will actually get done. I wonder if any have the courage to do it because that would be interesting!
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