Wanna Buy a Bridge?

One of Sir Tom Stoppard's earliest works was a one-act play called Albert's Bridge. The play tells the story of Albert, whose job it is to paint a railroad bridge. It takes him about 8 years to complete painting the bridge, at which time the bridge needs to be repainted. Since that timing doesn't work out so well, 1,800 painters are dispatched to paint the bridge in a single day, but their combined weight causes the bridge to collapse.

I read this play in my Brit Lit class in college, but I get the impression that Barack Obama never encountered it during his undergraduate years. Speaking in Cincinnati today, he tried to undergird his push for his putative jobs bill (you know, the one that Harry Reid won't bring to a vote) by tying the effort to a proposed bridge over the Ohio River:

Now, the bridge behind us just so happens to connect the state that’s home to the Speaker of the House with the state that’s home to the Minority Leader of the Senate. Sheer coincidence, of course. But part of the reason I came here is because Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell are the two most powerful Republicans in government. They can either kill this jobs bill, or they can help us pass it.

I know these men care about their states. And I can’t imagine that the Speaker wants to represent a state where nearly one in four bridges is classified as substandard. I know that when Senator McConnell visited the closed bridge in Kentucky, he said that “roads and bridges are not partisan in Washington.” I know that Paul Ryan, the Republican in charge of the budget process, recently said you can’t deny that “infrastructure does create jobs.”

Well if that’s the case, then there’s no reason for Republicans in Congress to stand in the way of more construction projects. There’s no reason to stand in the way of more jobs. Mr. Boehner, Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge. Help us rebuild America.

Perhaps not as resonant as "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," but certainly a nice try. And let's give the President credit for name checking three of his favorite pin cushions in one sound bite.

One little problem, though -- the bridge he'd like to use to bash in Boehner's political bridgework isn't exactly, ahem, shovel ready. Blogger Dodd Harris explains:

For one thing, the river crossing in question is already slated for a new bridge. It’s been in the planning stages for years; the project is currently barely into the public comment phase. In fact, Obama’s own FHWA doesn’t expect it to start construction in 2015 or be completed until 2022.

The President did not explain how his ‘jobs bill’ will alter time so that the project can start creating jobs “right now.”

So the project is four years off. And you can well imagine that the "public comment phase" will probably be contentious, primarily because of opposition from groups that typically support people like Barack Obama.
But there's more, according to Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times:

It doesn't really need repairs. It's got decades of good life left in its steel spans. It's just overloaded. The bridge was built to handle 85,000 cars and trucks a day, which seemed like a lot back during construction in the Nixon era.

Today, the bridge sort of handles more than 150,000 vehicles a day with frequent jam-ups.

So, plans are not to repair or replace the Brent Spence Bridge. But to build another bridge nearby to ease the loads.

But here's the problem, as John Merline graphically notes here, that could screw up all those envisioned photo op shots of the Democrat and the traffic:

The president's jobs bill is designed for "immediate" highway spending.

And there's the little matter of the stimulus spending that we've just undertaken. You know, the stuff that was going to reduce the level of unemployment. How's that been working?

I suppose we could spend another $400-500 billion. Maybe we could hire 1800 new workers, too. But I'm not sure it would turn out any better than it did for Albert's Bridge. But these days we're getting used to collapses.