The New New Deal (58 page)

“Can you imagine in two years, when that high-speed rail money from Wisconsin is actually creating jobs in Florida, and somebody runs a campaign ad with a guy in a hard hat saying: ‘Hey, I’ve got a great job. Thanks, Wisconsin!’” Klain said. “I think people in Wisconsin would say:
What?
That’s not a hypothetical job. It’s a real job.”

Victorious Republicans were vowing to cancel unspent stimulus funds, and Klain almost hoped they would try. The Recovery Act still had a counterfactual problem, with Americans refusing to believe it had averted worse outcomes, but they’d get to see those outcomes if stimulus projects were scrapped. “Republicans keep talking about rescissions. Okay, what do you want to rescind?” he said. “We can shut down a hundred road projects, and lay people off right now. That would be the best communications strategy for the Recovery Act.” The Spanish train manufacturer Talgo had already announced plans to shut down its Milwaukee factory, because Wisconsin no longer had a high-speed future. Walker couldn’t blame those job losses on Obama.

“It’s going to be a lot easier for us on defense than it was on offense,” Klain said.

But Scott, whose first foray into politics had been his ads attacking Obama’s health policies, began to signal he might kill the president’s signature project even if it wasn’t going to cost Florida a cent. At a Tea Party rally, he pointedly asked whether anyone planned to ride the train. Of course, no hands were raised. In a Washington meeting, he suggested he’d only let the project go forward if LaHood agreed to dredge the port of Miami, as if Florida would be doing Obama a favor by accepting his money. LaHood patiently explained that the Transportation Department doesn’t dredge ports. Congressman Mica of Orlando, who had been publicly critical of the train in his backyard, did not want Scott to kill it; Mica was about to take over the House Transportation
and Infrastructure Committee, and he assured me at the time that his new governor was just trying to drive a better bargain for his state. But Scott was starting to sound like a passive-aggressive fiancé who didn’t want to get married but didn’t want to be the one to break the engagement. “If I do this, it’s going to be grudgingly,” he told federal officials. “It’s not my priority.”

Scott had run on a jobs-jobs-jobs platform, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated the Tampa–Orlando line would create 27,000 jobs.
³⁹⁴
Two private reports commissioned by the state concluded that it would be highly profitable, and Orlando–Miami even more profitable. And LaHood offered unprecedented assurances that Florida would bear no risk for overruns or losses. “This was going to be the greatest deal on the planet,” one LaHood aide says. “If other states had heard about the guarantees Florida was getting, all hell would have broken loose.”

Scott decided to cancel the project anyway, claiming Florida could have been on the hook for overruns if the project failed, citing research by a libertarian think tank that had never met a train it didn’t hate. Scott’s slogan was “Let’s Get to Work,” but his base wasn’t interested in work funded by the government—especially Obama’s government. Scott instantly became a national hero in the twilight struggle against Obamaism.

LaHood had trouble comprehending how his party’s version of political correctness now required governors to reject transportation projects they didn’t even have to pay for. What had happened to the party of Lincoln, father of the transcontinental railroad, and Eisenhower, father of the interstate highways? “Now people listen to Beck and Hannity and Rush all day long,” LaHood says. “Trash talk, 24-7.” But so be it. If Florida didn’t want $2.4 billion, other states would gladly take it. And even Governor Scott, who had threatened to kill the Orlando commuter rail line as well—the project that LaHood had persuaded Florida to pursue in order to qualify for the high-speed rail money—agreed to let the project go forward after Chairman Mica went ballistic.

“We still know how to do big things in this country,” LaHood told me.

T
here is no bigger thing being done in this country than the California high-speed rail project, a shoot-the-moon effort to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours. It will have to overcome seismic faults, rugged mountain passes, and ferocious opposition from deep-pocketed homeowners and farmers who don’t want trains whipping through their communities. Ultimately, it could take more than twenty years and cost as much as $100 billion to complete. It’s often described as a political football, which seems wrong. Footballs get tossed and carried and fumbled, while the rail project just seems to get kicked—and not only by Republicans eager to embarrass Obama. California Democrats have also churned out reports questioning its route, costs, and sketchy ridership projections. But thanks to Governor Scott, it’s Obama’s only bullet train that still has a chance to be built. And thanks to the money diverted from Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, its first phase of construction will no longer be a train from nowhere to nowhere in the Central Valley. It now has enough cash to get from Fresno to Bakersfield—not exactly Paris–Lyon, but at least recognizable names on a map.

“You’ve got to start somewhere,” explains Fresno mayor Ashley Swearengin, a Republican who has bucked her party to support the project.

Yes, but in
Fresno
? The city began as a depot on the Central Pacific railroad, and as high-speed rail officials point out, it’s about the size of Lyon. But its downtown is now a dismal collection of boarded-up buildings, pawn shops,
botanicas
selling cheap statuary, check cashers, and, incongruously, a bronze Renoir sculpture of a washerwoman next to a Payless shoe store. And Bakersfield will never be confused for Paris. It’s got the nation’s least educated population, according to Brookings, and worst air quality, according to the American Lung Association.
³⁹⁵
In 2010, Fresno and Bakersfield had the nation’s third- and fifth-highest Latino unemployment rates.

Swearingen envisions high-speed rail as an economic redevelopment engine that could help revive both cities, and help connect the
fast-growing Central Valley to the rest of California. But that’s not the real reason the project is starting in the middle, hundreds of miles from its target markets in L.A. and the Bay Area. The Central Valley, with its flat terrain and sparse population, is the easiest and cheapest place to get started, and the project’s boosters are desperate to get it started before critics can stop it. As New York’s master builder Robert Moses used to say about public works, once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up. Fresno–Bakersfield would be ludicrous as a stand-alone, but it’s a nice foot in the door. By contrast, building tracks in congested urban areas would be much more disruptive and expensive, and the trains would have to travel much slower; the wide-open Central Valley is where they can hit 220 mph.

“It makes no sense to start in the Central Valley if we’re not serious about finishing. It’s like designing a moon mission to go a quarter of the way there,” says Roelof van Ark, the former head of California’s high-speed rail agency. “But if we’re serious, that’s the place to start. If we start at the ends, we’ll never do the middle.”

Even in the Central Valley, it won’t be easy to sink that first stake. I went to a public meeting in the small farm town of Hanford, where high-speed rail was seen as a federal assault on rural culture. The proposed route sliced through high-value crops—almonds, walnuts, grapefruits, a cherry orchard—as well as a local subdivision, and the residents didn’t want compensation. They wanted blood. John Tos, a fruit and nut farmer with six properties in the path of the train, warned the project’s officials that they would take his land over his dead body. “You know what it’s called when you take something without permission?” asked Tos, a fourth-generation farmer with fiery blue eyes and a gray Abe Lincoln beard. “RAPE!” The consensus in the room was that high-speed rail was a snobby metropolitan plot, designed to boost urban hellholes like Fresno at the expense of communities with bedrock values, financed by a liberal president on a borrowing binge. “The federal government is nothing but a Ponzi scheme!” shouted Tos, pronouncing “Ponzi” to rhyme with “bonsai.”

The Central Valley route should only affect about three thousand
acres of farmland, a pittance compared to the thirty thousand acres the area already loses to sprawl every year. Passing trains aren’t the main threat to Hanford’s rural character. But they do represent change. California expects to add twenty million residents over the next few decades, and there are only so many freeways and airports it can build. Schwarzenegger and his Democratic successor, Jerry Brown, both see high-speed rail as a big bet on a new era of American mobility, with California leading the way for trains just as it did for cars. “You’ve got to imagine the possibilities,” Schwarzenegger says. Valuable runway slots currently used to shuttle travelers between Northern and Southern California could be opened up for flights to Shanghai and Seoul. Intrastate trips would be comfortable, and the hours billable.

The problem is funding—or, more precisely, uncertainty about future funding. The feds have provided $3.6 billion in cash, and California voters have approved nearly $10 billion in bonds, more than enough to complete the Central Valley leg. But private firms, which see L.A.–San Francisco as a gold mine, are unwilling to provide financing without assurances the entire line will be built. And the California legislature is reluctant to start spending without assurances of continued federal support. When Obama unveiled a six-year, $53 billion plan to expand high-speed rail, Washington Republicans proclaimed it dead on arrival.

“The big challenge is convincing people this is a long-term project,” says van Ark, a former executive with several European train manufacturers. “This can’t be built in one election cycle. We need long-term vision.” Unfortunately, van Ark told me, the U.S. political system doesn’t work that way: “Asia has a long-term mentality. Europeans have a medium-term mentality. Americans are now, now, now.”

The state plan still calls for construction to begin in late 2012, Fresno–Bakersfield to be done by 2017, and the whole line to be running around 2030. Its fate may depend on the November election. No one wants to go a quarter of the way to the moon.

I
n California, high-speed rail is still a debating point, a futuristic vision of a new way to travel. In Illinois, the TRT-909—or Track Renewal
Train, affectionately known as the “yellow beast”—is already laying the groundwork for higher-speed rail. The TRT is a noisy mobile factory that replaces tracks as it trudges along them, pulling up old wooden ties and rails, putting down concrete ties and sturdier new rails. I watched the TRT clattering along the St. Louis–Chicago line near Normal, Illinois, and it was mesmerizing. Thanks to the yellow beast, an initial section will be upgraded from 79 mph to 110 mph this year, and travelers will save an hour when the project is done in 2014.

“It’s going to be an unbelievable boon for us,” says Normal mayor Chris Koos.

Trains are already so vital to Normal that its dumpy little yellow-brick Amtrak station—unaffectionately known as the “Amtrak shack”—is the fourth-busiest in the Midwest, behind only Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. And the town won a $22 million TIGER grant to replace it with an eco-friendly multi-modal station that will anchor its New Urbanist downtown revitalization. The station is rising next door to a children’s museum, a stone’s throw from a new nine-story Marriott with a conference center. Koos says the new downtown has attracted over $200 million in private investment, including an upscale restaurant founded by a Chicago chef, a gourmet coffee shop selling $5 caramel-vanilla lattes, and other telltale signs of revival. Normal is the home of Illinois State University—originally a “normal school” for teachers, which is how the town got its name—and the promise of fast access to Chicago is already helping with faculty and student recruitment as well. As we watched workers pour concrete for the station’s ticketing area, Koos told me the Recovery Act was transforming his town.

“People will start appreciating the stimulus when things start coming out of the ground,” he said.

Whether or not people appreciate it, the Recovery Act is already renovating train stations in cities like Portland, San Jose, St. Paul, and yes, Wilmington, where the newly improved Victorian station has already been renamed for Amtrak Joe Biden. Amtrak’s high-speed rail projects are under way in states like Missouri, Michigan, and Maine, where the Downeaster service is being extended twenty-six miles to Brunswick; like Normal, the town is enjoying a train-related boom,
with $100 million worth of investments in retail, office, condominiums, and a hotel near the station. Thanks in large part to funds diverted from Florida, the Recovery Act is also financing improvements to the Northeast Corridor, including a new electrical system that will increase speeds in New Jersey, a new bypass that will unclog a choke point in Manhattan, and extra tracks that will allow faster trains to pass in Delaware and Rhode Island.

These projects aren’t game-changers. They’re game-adjusters, baby steps toward better service. And they aren’t happening on a stimulus timetable. As they start producing results, shaving minutes off trips, travelers won’t associate them with the Recovery Act. But over time, LaHood says, passenger trains will become a more attractive option.

“I’ve got nine grandchildren,” he says. “High-speed rail is for them, not for me.”

N
o matter how badly a day was going at the White House, there was always one word that could make it go worse: Solyndra. The day after the election, the company announced it was shutting down a factory and laying off two hundred employees. Wait: Wasn’t the stimulus supposed to
create
jobs?

Solyndra tried to spin the moves as good news, and in a way they were. The company still had a thousand employees, and was executing new CEO Brian Harrison’s plan to shrink its bloated research division. Shutting down its old factory made sense, too, since its more efficient new stimulus-funded factory was scheduled to come online soon. But White House energy adviser Heather Zichal had a more realistic assessment of the news in an internal email: “No es bueno.” And there was more bad news that Solyndra chose not to announce. It was running out of cash again. Solar prices were still plummeting, and the European crisis was killing its best market.