Matt Yglesias notices Joe Biden talking up the wonders of rail:
It's a bit unsettling to face up to, but the creation of national policy often follows a scarily delicate path. For instance, John F. Kennedy's interest in poverty, which laid the groundwork for the War on Poverty, came because he read Dwight MacDonald's long essay on Michael Harrington's book The Other America. And thus a national crusade was born. If he'd missed that issue of The New Yorker, the path of American social policy might have proven quite different. Meanwhile, Joe Biden didn't come to support rail through an abstract interest in urban policy. Rather, his first wife died young, and he needed to be around for his kids, and so he rode the train a lot. President-elect Obama, similarly, has lived in Chicago and New York, and so has some visceral experience with the utility of pubic transit. He's not shown any particular interest or leadership on the issue, but his lived experience suggests he'll have the urbaner's traditional sympathy for transit. That wasn't true for Clinton, in Arkansas, or Gore, in Tennessee, or Bush, in Texas, or Cheney, in Wyoming. And though it would be odd if transit policy was decisively transformed because the Senator from Delaware took the train a lot, and the president had lived in Chicago and so was favorably disposed towards trains, and these feelings intersected with a moment of tremendous infrastructure and acute concern over vehicle emissions, weirder things have happened.
