Lacking convictions of his own, Charlie Crist was always going to glom onto Barack Obama's.
But high-speed rail? Would Charlie really go there?
That's what the Democratic gubernatorial candidate said he would do during his campaign announcement: "Yes, my friends, we are going to renew the effort to create a high-speed rail and mass transit system."
Maybe Charlie was just being Charlie, milking the moment, playing to the friends of high-speed rail with fat wallets. But I think on this one he's doing Obama's bidding.
High-speed rail was once a central part of Obama's vision for government -- one in which the nations infrastructure, schools and health-care systems would be modernized to meet the challenges of globalization and expand the middle class.
The president hasn't given up on any of that; yet, the grand project to create an interconnecting national network of bullet trains has been a stunning failure virtually everywhere except the most populated commuting corridors, where service doesn't have to be built from scratch. Even with billions upon billions of dollars in stimulus cash four years ago, high-speed rail as replacement travel was always financially unattainable.
Cut it any way you like, one of Rick Scott's most astute, most responsible decisions as governor was the one he made in 2011 to turn down the $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money to build an Orlando-to-Tampa high-speed rail line.
Scott measured the layers of cost to Florida against the benefits that high-speed rail presents. At the end of the process, he turned the stimulus money down for three reasons:
-- He predicted construction cost overruns would put Florida taxpayers on the hook for $3 billion.
-- He said low ridership would have required state subsidies.
-- He said the money would come with a caveat. If the project were shut down, the state would have to return the $2.4 billion to Washington.
Scott made his high-profile announcement just two days after Obama released his federal budget, which Scott criticized during his news conference, noting that it included a $1.65 trillion deficit.
"Government has become addicted to spending beyond its means and we cannot continue this flawed policy," Scott said. "Let us never forget, whether it is Washington or Tallahassee, government has no resources of its own. Government can only give to us what it has previously taken from us."
You may disagree, but I've always believed that was Gov. Scott's finest moment. It was bold direction amid a cacophony of legislator protest groups, snarky, spend-happy members of Congress and special interests who wanted to wrest the decision away from him, even take him to court.
In the end, Florida wasn't the only state to reject stimulus money for high-speed rail. Republican Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin, doomed the initiative in those states, too. Ohio and Wisconsin money went to California; more than $2 billion from Floridas share went to 15 states and Amtrak.
The only real shot high-speed rail has left is in California. White House insiders say if the Golden State can pull off its San Francisco-to-Los-Angeles line, that will breathe new life into the initiative.
But now even California's plan is in jeopardy. Its ambition has been scaled back and projected costs have increased. Even voters have turned on it. A survey in mid-2012 by USC-Dornsife and the Los Angeles Times found that if given a second chance to vote on the 2008 $9 billion bond issue that funded the early stages of the project, 59 percent of survey respondents would vote it down.
It seems to me, in 2010 -- two years after Washington made the stimulus money available -- if Charlie Crist believed high-speed rail was so important for Florida -- as much as Charlie Crist can believe anything -- he would have run for re-election instead of for the U.S. Senate. He would have stuck around, pulled legislators together and made Florida high-speed rail happen.
I believe that in the last three years, the vast majority of Floridians have developed a taste for fiscal restraint, and no way will they let that ride out on a rail.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423.
