Bike Baby Bike!

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Thursday March 26, 2009 · 9:40 AM PDT

2009/03/26 · 09:40

One of the primary strategies of DC Republicans in their efforts to halt all efforts at finding a solution to the problems they caused is to find items in Obama's stimulus and budget bills to pick out, isolate , and demonize. Not-ready-for-prime-time Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal tried to do this with his famous (or infamous) swipe at volcano monitoring, for which he received quite deserved ridicule. Now it's Rep. Eric Cantor's turn. This is from an interview on The Takeway (h/t CarltonReid):

Rep. Eric Cantor: To give you an example, if you want to give the public sector money, to give you an example of the stimulus bill that recently passed through the Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and was signed into law by the president. The almost $800 billion bill. To give you just an example, $3 million went to the District of Columbia. You know what they did with that money? They’re going to go build bike paths, and they’re going to increase the number of bike racks in neighborhoods like Georgetown. I don’t think that that’s a stimulative move.

John Hockenberry: If you were working on the construction crew that was working on those bike paths, you’d think it was stimulus, wouldn’t you?

Rep. Eric Cantor: We need to create lasting jobs, and that’s how we create wealth, and that’s how people get confidence back. If they know that the jobs and the economy are going to start growing again. You don’t grow the economy by only stimulating public sector spending. We’ve seen that over and over again. History has shown...

It's to Hockenberry's credit that he points out, in a rather gentle but quite effective way, that what Cantor is saying is nonsense on its face, and Cantor immediately leaves off the argument and goes into one of the Repub's other favorite tactic, the non-historical history lesson.

So the point here is this: bike paths are stimulative. They also happen to be good public policy, good energy policy, as everyone who is riding a bike to work is not riding in a car, adding pollutants to the atmosphere, wearing down the roadbeds (leading to infrastructure needs that Republicans don't want to pay for) etc. So "Bike baby bike" is better policy, as well as catchier, than "drill baby drill." But a person like Cantor, who's job is to come up with ways to bring Obama down in the polls a percentage point or two, and not, you know, try to solve the problems facing the country, can't be expected to understand that - or admit it.

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