Unless you pay close attention to the letters-to-the editor column of the Daily Local News, you may not have noticed that the 2008 election for the 156th State House District is already underway. It's being fought by a group of Republican activists against the first Democrat to hold the seat in more than a century. Since she won by only 28 votes after a long and bitter recount battle, Republican strategists consider her seat "vulnerable" and are trying to lay the groundwork for a campaign to retake her seat. The tactics, at least until the Interstate 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, were simple — present the transportation portion of the state's annual budget as a boondoggle and then castigate McIlvaine Smith as the "only Chester County representative" who voted for it. To do that required leaving out a lot of details about the bill and completely avoiding the fact that the vote in the State House broke down along party lines, with four Republicans voting with the Democratic majority while only one Democratic voted against the bill. (All of the other representatives from Chester County are Republicans.)		The priority is clear in this photo of the Chester County Republican headquarters, which appeared in the DLN on January 6, 1995
Making the case were a collection of letter writers, most of whom live outside of McIlvaine Smith's district (West Sadsbury,Thorndale, Upper Uwclan, etc). They were joined by Representative Art Hershey, a Republican from the western part of Chester County. All but Hershey sprinkled their letters with words like "irresponsible," "ilk," "fear," and of course, "tax-and-spend." They claimed that the transportation package created "more taxation with less representation" because it increased the amount of funding for public transportation. The unstated argument is that only people in Philadelphia use public transportation, so Chester County residents should not have to pay for it. Such an argument ignores the number of Philadelphians who use SEPTA to reach low-wage jobs in Chester County, because they don't earn enough to live in the suburbs. Representative Hershey's argument was even more novel -- he opposed the transportation bill because it called for charging tolls on Interstate 80 which "could lead to the tolling of other roads in the future" and because by spending some of the money on mass transit, it "will not generate enough revenue to repair the many deficiencies in the state's road and bridge system." In other words, he supports taxpayer subsidies to out-of-state drivers instead of charging them user fees (i.e. tolls), and he wants to spend all of the money on infrastructure that has been neglected for years instead of looking for ways to reduce the burden on our infrastructure (simultaneously reducing fuel consumption, but that's a different debate). [Quotations are from Hershey's "A review of 2007-08 state budget" which appeared in the Daily Local News on July 26, 2007.] There is no argument that our roads and bridges are in bad shape, and nor does anyone think that traffic is getting better -- it's not, it's getting worse. But if you compare traffic to the problem of moving water through a pipe, then the analysis becomes simple. To prevent backups, you can either add more pipes, move more water through the same pipe, or stop trying to move so much water. Since no politician is likely to suggest that our society reduce its travel, that leaves expanding the road network or moving more traffic on the existing network. If carpooling put two people into each car instead of one, we could nearly double our capacity by reducing the number of cars on the road by about half. Buses make even more efficient use of our roads by doing the work of 20-40 single passenger vehicles in the space of about five. From a capacity standpoint, trains are the best because one passenger car with 100 passengers takes up the space of about 10 vehicles. Naturally, there are other issues of convenience an access, but they justify spending more money on public transit. By squeezing more passengers and freight onto existing rails and roads, public transportation increases the capacity of our infrastructure without requiring expensive land purchases that gobble up open space, or creating even more infrastructure that needs to be maintained. Criticism of McIlvaine Smith's transportation vote subsided after the Minneapolis bridge collapse, since no one wants to be accused of blocking repairs on the next bridge that causes a death. But the basic motivation of McIlvaine Smith's attackers remains unchanged -- to take back a seat that "belongs" to their party. Therein lies the most disturbing thing about this conspiracy. Their goal is not good roads or even rational spending, it's about making the party more powerful. Earlier this week, Americans learned that Karl Rove announced he will retire at the end of this month. Numerous commentators identified Rove as the architect of the Republican party's attempt to create a "perpetual majority" at all levels of government, something that we call a one-party state in countries that we do not like. Although Rove will soon be gone, he leaves behind a party still dominated by activists who fantasize about a world in which they face no opposition. Their schemes make it that much tougher for honest politicians of all parties to deal with the problems that they failed to face. Disclaimer: The author of this piece, WCJIM, is currently registered as a Democrat after many years as an independent and fewer years as a Republican.