On Meet the Press, GOP Strategist Gillespie Goes Off The Rails With "Out Of Touch" Comment
February 20, 2011 4:28 pm ET by Fae Jencks
On today's edition of Meet the Press, the panel included former Republican National Committee chairman and longtime Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, who ridiculed President Obama's plan to develop high-speed rail lines across the United States. After providing GOP talking points on the union protests in Wisconsin and praising congressional Republicans for tackling the mounting federal debt, which, he claimed, Obama isn't doing, Gillespie highlighted Obama's high-speed rail proposal as evidence that the president is "out of touch." Watch:
DAVID GREGORY (host): My question though, Ed, is whether or not Republicans are looking at all this and saying, "Look, we got to own the budget message," yes, but are they worried that Republicans overreach here, which is what, of course ... the Democrats and the White House are counting on?
GILLESPIE: I don't sense that right now, David. I've never seen a political environment, and particularly on the Republican side, but generally as well, where there is a greater political risk to be seen as unwilling to cut spending than there is to be cutting spending. I've never seen a dynamic like this like we see right now. And again, that's why I think President Obama's out of touch. I mean, you know, Amtrak loses $1 billion a year. He's proposing $53 billion for high-speed rail in his budget. We're not losing money fast enough? We got to lose it at a faster rate? It is -- they -- there's a disconnect here that I think is going to cost him in 2012.
In reality, it is Gillespie who, like many in the right-wing media, is out of touch. Gillespie's claim that the project is a waste of money completely discounts the economic boon high-speed rail is estimated to create.
Gillespie adds to the litany of conservative media figures who have consistently ignored the job-creating potential of high-speed rail. Gillespie's comments follow a week of misleading reporting on Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to refuse federal funding for a high-speed rail corridor between Tampa and Orlando. While conservative media figures praised Scott for standing up for fiscal responsibility by rejecting the federal money, they ignored the estimated tens of thousands of jobs his decision cost the state.
Indeed, recent studies have found that high-speed rail has huge economic and job creating potential across the country. A recent study conducted by Siemens and the Economic Development Research Group for the United States Conference of Mayors found that high-speed rail could bring an estimated 55,000 new jobs to Los Angeles, 42,000 jobs to Chicago, 27,500 to Orlando, and 21,000 jobs to Albany, NY -- as well as billions in business sales and new wages in those cities.
Something else that needs to be learned from both the outside world and history - when your international power and influence declines, as it most certainly is in the process of doing at the moment, is when you reap the whirlwind from the way in which you treated those that you once had power over.
Whether it would be enough to make it profitable, I don't know, but it would certainly be worth a look.
Flying is just too damn expensive, also.
A full-on conversion of our current rail system over to high-speed would create jobs for decades in pretty much every state.
High Speed would make the difference.
I can understand that lengthy rail travel probably compares poorly with air travel, but yeah, getting high-speed rail could make it far more competitive.
They got nothin' else.
To create high speed rails just because it will create jobs is silly. To create high speed rails in certain parts of the country because it is needed and will be used is great.
The same thing happened when President Obama offered high speed rail assistance to GA. The republican majority in our state legislature said that the state was broke and refused to borrow the money we needed. Lo, and behold, in November 2010, one of the wingnut legislators took a lobbyist funded jaunt with his family to Europe to look at high speed rail. Now he has drafted a bill to begin working on high speed rail for the state. There's something similar in each of these cases, and that's that it wasn't that the screaming wingnuts didn't see the value of high speed rail to the state, they just didn't like the two men who proposed the idea. This type of stupidity seems to always elude the wingnut voters here, and it's funny how they can embrace an idea if it only comes from someone they consider to be the "right" person. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: A good idea can come from any person in this country. It's up to us to be receptive to these new ideas and stop focusing on the political party with which the individual is affiliated.
Exactly. The nutjob Republicans don't care about governing effectively, they just care about retaining the power to govern.
When the next person complains that Amtrak loses money, ask them how much money their local interstate highway makes.
In other words, ANYTHING that Obama like must be BAD, right?
Trains, unions, women's rights, latino judges, climate change ...
ROFLMAO
Excellent discussion here on the practicalities of different transportation modes.
Siemens makes great rail vehicles for densely populated areas like Germany and Japan. If big city American mayors want that kind of transport, let them pay for it out of local user fees.
No, it*s not so much about the state*s rights tenth amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. It*s more about the ninth amendment.
Or as my state constitution puts it in article one, section one:
**All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.**
It would be just plain silly for the roads to end at the city limits.
Perhaps I misunderstood you. It really is in the public interest to serve the public in general rather than whoever is desperate enough to sacrifice the most.
Interesting. Others have answered your argument quite well, so I'll just ask this. Are women defined as "people?"
(And why do you use asterisks instead of quotation marks?)
We're talking about high-speed rail here, not intra-city commuter service. Here in North Texas, they've been talking on again/off again about service from Dallas to Austin (to San Antonio). But about 90% of that rail line would be outside of any city or incorporated area. Are the cities supposed to pay for the entire rail project? Though the user fees would eventually pay for the rail, those cities will be deep in the hole until that happens and it will take many, many years. In current times, I don't think there's a city anywhere in this country who would be willing to tie up the kind of money it would take to do these projects for the projected amount of time it would take to recover their money.
Financing rail is no different than financing roads. Bonds are sold for initial construction costs. Then that and maintenance costs are paid for by the user fee on gasoline.
The gasoline user fee is a market mechanism that allocates costs in proportion to usage. Fares and cargo fees serve the same function on rail.
Then to top EVERTHING the GOP does to ensure they win every election (read: citizens united, union busting, and Health care lies) the American people BELIEVE IT. I hear people that are so many uniformed people parroting the FOX talking points, then they are all of a sudden fact! Even CNN and other "news" orginizations are too scared of Fox and want ratings too bad to call a spade a spade!
Im so disgusted to be an American! Thank you MMFA for your hard work. I dont know how you stand listening to right wing "news" ALL DAY. I liked it so much better when i was uniformed about politics. Atleast then i didnt know the supreme court was fixed!!!!