Palin to RNC: It’s Drill or “Do Nothing at All”

11:59 AM EDT on September 4, 2008

If there was any question as to where a John McCain-Sarah Palin White House would stand on transportation, the prospective VP's speech to the Republican National Convention left little room for doubt. Here's Palin from last night, via Grist:

"Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve allof America's energy problems -- as if we all didn't know that already.But the fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to donothing at all. Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going tolay more pipelines and build more nuclear plants and create jobs withclean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and otheralternative sources."

Grist notes that Palin, um, fudged a little in her refutation of Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere." Despite her claim that as governor she turned down federal funds for the bridge, Palin once supported the much-maligned project, and Alaska is using the earmarks intended for it to build a road to the proposed bridge site.

Though Palin scored millions in hated "pork" for bus and rail projects, her tenure as mayor of Wasilla apparently did not bring about much in the way of livable streets improvements.

Writes Charles Wohlforth in The New Republic:

I had written a Frommer's travel guidebook about Alaska (I live in Anchorageand was on the Municipal Assembly here at the time). In the book, I franklydescribed Wasilla as a place to skip, "the worst kind of suburban sprawl ofhighway-fronting shopping malls and gravel lots."
Wasilla boosters were furious and a local media debate erupted.A good many people came in on my side: Wasilla, with a complete lack of communityplanning, is truly Alaska'sleast attractive town.

Streetsblogger Doc Barnett concurs:

Frommer's description of Wasilla is accurate. Its residents (includingsome of my family) live there to get away from all the big-cityproblems of multicultural Anchorage. No, seriously. And then they tryto figure out how to shorten driving times around the gigantic naturalfeature (Cook Inlet) they have decided to put between themselves andtheir jobs (if any).

In a collection of local news headlines tracking Palin's career, Politico lists a story citing her support for a Wasilla bill to outlaw non-motorized vehicles -- "skateboards, in-line skates, bicycles, scooters" -- on public or private property where signage prohibited their use, under penalty of fines and/or confiscation.

Photo from Wasilla, AK via Mudflats

Brad Aaron

Brad Aaron began writing for Streetsblog in 2007, after years as a reporter, editor, and publisher in the alternative weekly business. Brad adopted New York's dysfunctional traffic justice system as his primary beat for Streetsblog. He lives in Manhattan.

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