A few days ago I posted here about Wisconsin's newly-elected rightwing Governor, Scott Walker, forging ahead with a campaign pledge to kill high-speed rail between Madison and Milwaukee - - an Obama administration gift to Wisconsin that provided 100% construction for the $810 million line and a 90% share of the annual operating cost, and through the 2013 construction timetable, more than 4,700 jobs.
Feeling the heat - - having run as a purportedly pro-jobs candidate, and seeing both the construction work and a Talgo train high-speed train assembly plant in a depressed Milwaukee neighborhood perhaps closing before it ever got up and running - - Walker did a stunningly and audaciously arrogant thing:
He asked US DOT Secretary Ray Lahood to bail him out of his predicament, but not before he amped up the attack on high-speed rail nationally.
Read on...
Walker had been promoting the fiction - - as I pointed out in a postings on my Wisconsin politics and environment blog and at Daily Kos (you can get into these matters here) - - that there was precedent for taking federal rail funding and switching it to highway building.
So continuing the myth-making, Walker then wrote to Lahood, and urged him to kill high-speed rail nationally and allow states like Wisconsin to use the money for more road-building.
You can follow this turn of events and find a link to Walker's letter to Lahood and context, here.
It's amazing Walker might think that after ripping rail, and anything else the Obama administration had done (particularly health care reform) during the Wisconsin campaign that the Obama people would bail him out politically as he used rail to gin up his base against an urban agenda and Wisconsin's liberal cities' Democrats
I'd predict a couple of things.
The feds will say no.
Walker will then blame them for the long-standing shortage in Wisconsin of road-building dollars - - which is due, in part, to an over-subscription to the highway fund because too many new highways are demanded by legislators and governors of both parties.
Walker is on record supporting $4.7 billion of such projects: expansion and reconstruction of freeways and interstate highways in SE Wisconsin, and from the Illinois state line northwest to the Wisconsin Dells.
Walker is trying to push off the funding issue to the feds.
To distract attention from a singular fact he cannot refudiate.
It is he, Walker, who ran against the train and is now responsible for the consequences - - the project and employment cancellations.