Random Observations on a train without an observation car

9 comments September 28th, 2008

Well, that was fun. No, really it was. Our whirlwind trip to New Orleans and back was worthwhile in gauging voter attitudes toward this important presidential election that’s coming up Nov. 4.

From what people from all walks of life and quite a few states told Scott Morgan and me, this election, if it were held now, would be a nail-biting stay-up-all-nighter.

But a lot can change in a month. Indeed, who can predict what crazy turn this campaign season will take next? Will Joe Biden be rushed to the hospital for emergency foot-in-mouth surgery? Will Sarah Palin attempt to prove her knowledge of foreign policy by inviting Vladimir Putin to a moose-hunting expedition in Alaska? Wouldn’t surprise me.

I found near-universal disgust over the supposed financial crisis our leaders tell us we are in. Some, however, were resigned to a federal bailout, believing the alternative – letting banks fail – would be worse.

I had never been to New Orleans before, and I was surprised at the large crowds of tourists in the city, the parades in the French Quarter, the art fair near the Audubon Zoo that we saw, and most of all, the friendliness of people we met. One waitress asked me to tell you this: “Y’all come see us, now.”

Most importantly, I could see post-Katrina reconstruction going on everywhere we went in the city they call the Big Easy. A one-day visit doesn’t make anyone an expert, and I did not have time to tour the infamous Lower 9^th ward, where recovery progress is slow. And from reading the local paper, the Times-Picayune, it’s obvious that local government corruption continues unabated. The infrastructure needs hundreds of millions of dollars worth of improvement.

But my ride-by observation via streetcar convinced me to take with a grain of salt the doom-and-gloom scenarios about New Orleans that I see on cable TV news. Certainly the city is not going to be abandoned. There’s another side of the Woe Thy Name is New Orleans story, but you have to use your own eyes to find it because it won’t be on TV. This is the story of sweat equity, private money, hometown pride, the love of a city among the most unique in North America, one with its own culture, music and cuisine.

Our return trip on Amtrak’s City of New Orleanswas uneventful. Again, the crew members did a great job working under slashed budgets, aging equipment and fewer services than they’ve had in the past. The menu features some regional cuisine from New Orleans, and the food is very good.

Amtrak could run the trains on faster schedules if the freight railroads they run on would adhere to the law that gives Amtrak trains priority over freights. We really need to get serious about bringing our rail system up to par with Europe’s fast-growing system of 200 mph trains. It was embarrassing to hear Anna Olsen, the journalist from Denmark on our train, talk about her encounters with our inferior public transportation and compare our trains and buses to those in Europe. “I took a Greyhound once,” she said. “Never again.”

I’ll remember most the young people on the New Orleans streetcar. They were from Pass Christian, Miss., and their town suffered greatly from Katrina. Although they are at the rebellious ages of 19, 18 and 17, all three were polite in that charming Southern way that continues on through the generations. I actually enjoyed having my questions answered with “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” And I liked the fact that they wanted me to know that their town is being rebuilt.

Politically, here’s a digest of what I heard: People who like John McCain tend to talk about his military service, especially his prisoner-of-war experience in the Vietnam War. His refusal to accept an offer to be released unless other U.S. prisoners couldn’t go with him gives his supporters reassurance that he a strong character, a sense of fair play.

But they didn’t have much of an idea what McCain would do as president, except try to end earmarks, which he can’t do because it would be like trying to ban Christmas, Easter and the Fourth of July. Congress wouldn’t stand for it.

People who back Barack Obama believe him when he says he’ll bring change to Washington. They interpret that as change that will bring a better quality of life and more money in their pockets. His voters tend to be young, lower middle class people. The question is, will their enthusiasm for Obama carry over to the voting booth?

Sarah Palin did not seem to have much support, even among McCain supporters. For them it was more like, “Well, McCain picked her, and I like McCain, so I guess she’ll do.”

And the name Biden didn’t come up much.

Our train was a bit late, but not much.

On the campaign trail for the readers in Copenhagen

Add comment September 28th, 2008

Turns out we were not the only reporters on the train back to Chicago. Anna Olsen, who writes for the Sjaellandske Media group in Denmark, was also on board — in coach class.

Olsen, 31, covered Friday’s  presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., for her newspaper and was traveling from Mississippi to Carbondale to catch a bus to St. Louis for Thursday’s vice presidential debate at Washington University.

In addition to covering politics, Olsen also writes about transportation and infrastructure issues, “so my objective is to use only trains and buses, and no cars.” This can be  cumbersome, and sometimes impossible, in car-crazy America, as she learned when trying to find a bus or train to get from Memphis to Oxford. There are none. “I was forced to rent a car,” she said. As for the debate?

“I think it was a tie,” she said of the match-up between Barack Obama and John McCain.

 ”I would have liked more dialogue between the candidates and less posturing. It was not so much a debate as two men bickering at each other. They should have been confronting each other, and they didn’t. For instance, McCain talked about a spending freeze, but Obama didn’t pay any attention to it. That is a major difference between them,” she said.

Olsen said the debate did highlight some major differences between the two men, “and I didn’t expect McCain to do as well as he did, considering  he cancelled it once.”

On the mortage meltdown crisis, “the major difference between the two is that McCain doesn’t want to do any regulation on the financial institutions – until he changed his mind last week — while Obama has six guidelines for the institutions to follow.”

Europeans are paying close attention to this presidential election,  Olsen said, because “the last four to eight years have been catastrophic for U.S. cooperation with Europe, and the world in general. I completely agreed with Obama, you need to sit down and talk to leaders that you don’t necessarily like, or who have a different kind of government than yours.” 

In the debate, McCain “wanted to make sure that the American people knew of his experience in foreign policy, and he threw a lot of strange names of world leaders out there. He made it clear he knew what he was talking about, and he was trying to diminish Obama. But Obama never retaliated. He should have.” 

Olsen is in the U.S. through mid-November.