Monday, October 12, 2009

Creigh Deeds has a plan for Tables

If you've been listening to Creigh Deeds on the campaign trail, you might think his economic recovery plan involves encouraging the manufacture of new tables for Virginia. After all, he plans to spend a lot of time around tables, putting things on tables, and discussing what's on the tables. And with all the people he wants to get together at tables, we're probably going to need some more tables.

Of course, tables tend to stay in one place, and people around tables tend to just talk a lot. To get traffic moving, we need more than table-talk.

In this WTOP interview, Deeds apparently mentioned tables over 14 times in 11 minutes:

Democrat Creigh Deeds says in a radio interview that offering detailed positions on transportation funding would kill chances of passing it if he's elected governor. "In an appearance Friday on WTOP's politics show, the state senator repeated his familiar mantra that ‘everything is on the table' for transportation funding, including new taxes."

The magic table is expected to solve all our transportation problems:

The only approach that's worked on transportation in the last thirty years is the approach employed by Governor Baliles in 1986 and that's the approach I'm gonna take. Everything to fix transportation is on the table. And I want to bring everybody to the table to bring ... to create that solution. And I'm gonna do it next year. Everything's on the table that has a nexus to transportation,

The Baliles approach Deeds mentions from 1986 was imposing a 17+ cent gas tax. Which I guess is why the gas tax is about the only idea Deeds specifically mentions as "on the table", and why Deeds says the Baliles' approach (raising gas taxes?) is the approach Deeds will take.

More table talk:

I'm going to be the next governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia and were going to have an open and honest discussion with Democrats and Republicans around the table and we're going to consider all the options because the bottom line is we cannot grow, we cannot prosper if we continue to sit in traffic.

Instead of sitting in traffic, we'll all be sitting around the table.

But I'm guessing that the people of Virginia want to move forward, they want to solve this problem and I've got the only real realistic solution to get it fixed and that's bringing everybody to the table, leaving everything on the table, except taking money away from education and having an honest discussion about transportation.

I wonder if there will be food at the table? And if there is, will we be able to take that off the table, or will we have to leave all the food spoiling on the table?

Mark, I said that everything is on the table when it comes ... that has a nexus to transportation. We've got a significant problem, we have to raise something in excess of a billion dollars.

I wonder how big a table you need to be able to put a billion dollars on it.

Mark, I have said that everything that has a nexus to transportation is on the table. If you look at the different approaches that have been taken by governors since Baliles to address transportation - they've all failed, and part of the reason they've failed is because they've identified, they started out with something very specific that has become polarizing.

Well, the last 8 years certainly they've failed, but I think that had more to do with the inability of the democratic governors to actually put together a plan, not because they couldn't find a table.

I think if we leave as much on the table as possible, that we bring as many people to the table as possible, we have more areas we can agree on. This is such an urgent issue that has to be addressed I think sooner rather than later - it has to be addressed next year, my first year as governor. I want the best chance for success and I think that leaving more things on the table will give us that opportunity.

I wonder if this will be an indoor or outdoor table. It apparently will have lots of stuff all over it, a billion dollars lying around, and be surrounded by as "many people" as we can possibly fit.

I think I've figured out the secret to this transportation plan. If we just get enough people around the table, it will get them off the roads so traffic will move better.

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