Usually, when we speak about a President having an impact on our lives, we do so in relatively generalized and abstract terms, often related to the state of the macro-economy, be it positive or negative in nature. He generally gets credit when things are going well and blame when they're not (whether deserved or not). Much more rarely can we point to actual, specific examples of a President’s policies directly affecting the quality of our everyday lives. But I have one such example.
I live in Santa Clarita, a bedroom community located about 35 miles north of Los Angeles. I also teach high school in L.A. and for close to 30 years now I have commuted back and forth for much of that distance (my workplace is actually 28 miles from my home). In order to get from Santa Clarita to L.A., one must travel through a narrow gap in the Santa Susanna Mountains called the Newhall Pass. You may remember that picture from the 1994 Northridge earthquake of a number of vehicles sitting stranded on a small strip of freeway that had NOT come crashing down in the quake. That was the Newhall Pass.
The Newhall Pass is also the place where three major freeways come together: the Interstate 5, which essentially runs up the length of the state; the 14, which veers northeast into the upper desert region of Palmdale and Lancaster; and the 405, which eventually winds its way down to San Diego and beyond. Needless to say, with all these cars going through this area - at “rush hour,” in particular - the Newhall Pass has always been a gridlocked bottleneck and an Exhibit A example of a commuters’ nightmare. I can’t count all the hours (especially while homeward bound on a Friday night) that I have spent creeping along or stopping altogether through that pass.
Yet, that was then and this is now. For, this year, something truly amazing happened in the Newhall Pass, something I would never have thought possible even in my wildest dreams. The Newhall Pass got widened. And not just a little widened, but a lot widened. And now, all of a sudden, I breeze right through the Newhall Pass, and it will be even better when an additional new lane opens in the next few months. So what once was a hair-pulling commuters’ nightmare has now become a daily pleasure.
And all of this I can attribute directly to President Obama. It was HE who pushed for the stimulus funding that made all this possible. It was HE who proved that spending on infrastructure could not only create jobs, but could also improve the quality of life for tremendous numbers of people who use that interchange on a daily basis. Simply put, without him in office, none of this would ever have happened and I would be looking at years of idling in stalled traffic.
The irony is that the congressman for the Santa Clarita and Palmdale area is “Buck” McKeon, a dyed-in-the-wool, pro-war Republican who would never have lifted a finger to widen the Newhall Pass, would never have made the slightest effort to make life better for the thousands of commuters who live in his district (being a Republican, he obviously voted against the stimulus). And certainly no Republican president would ever have done such a thing.
So here’s my sincere, personal thank you to President Obama for actually making a positive difference in my life - and the lives of all the other drivers who commute right alongside me through the Newhall Pass.