After presiding over the raucus White House Easter Egg Hunt this morning, Obama and Biden mosied over to the DOT headquarters in Washington to celebrate a milestone for the stimulus bill — transportation project number 2000. It’s a $68 million for widening I-94 in Michigan and doing something or other with an overpass. The work will take more than two years and create 1,500 or so jobs.

Obama, surrounded on stage by construction workers, made his usual pitch about rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, making the biggest infrastructure investment since Eisenhower, and recreating the country for the 21st century. He said nice things about Transporation Secretary Ray LaHood and the “TIGER Team” of sharpies who were getting all these projects approved so quickly.
Amid all the ceremony, there was a tantalizing bit of stimulus gossip, however: The president weighed in the hotly contested question of which was the nation’s first project. Missouri, Maryland, Nebraska and California have all been bickering over who held the honor.

Recalling an earlier visit to the DOT, he said, “Work on the very first project — resurfacing route 650 in Silver Springs, Maryland — began that very same day.” Because of the tight camera angle, it wasn’t clear if anyone from Missouri stormed out at that point.

(Image: AFP)

During the president’s town hall meeting in France today, he took the opportunity to speak very frankly about his longstanding envy of the Continent’s rail system. In the video clip, skip ahead to 5:30 if you’re not in the mood to hear once again about how America will defeat Al Qaeda. Here’s what he said:

I do think that in — in crisis, there’s always opportunity, if it’s used properly. So for example, in the United States, we decided to pass a large stimulus package to help growth at a time when, you know, the private sector was having a very bad — difficult time.

Now, we could have just spent the money on the same old ways of doing things. But part of what we decided was if we’re going to be spending a lot of government money anyway, why not spend it to double the amount of renewable energy? Why not spend it on retrofitting existing government buildings so that we drastically reduce their energy consumption?

Why not start building high-speed rail? One thing that, as an American who is proud as anybody of my country – I am always jealous about European trains. And I said to myself, why can’t we have — (applause) — why can’t we have high-speed rail? And — and so we’re investing in that, as well.

So on the transportation front, on — with respect to building construction, on a whole range of issues, we are investing in new technologies that will make us more energy efficient. And that is one of the building blocks that’s needed in order for us to reduce our carbon footprint and to work with other countries to achieve the climate change goals that I think are going to be so important.

At the White House this morning, after a “summit” on stimulus spending, Obama gave a pep talk to governors that included a stern warning that state and local officials will be “called out” if funds are being “squandered.”

He also highlighted the fact that all their efforts would judged against the warnings of critics who are saying that government has doesn’t have role in this situation: “There are those who think we should be focusing exclusively on Wall street during this crisis and that we don’t have time to worry about infrastructure,” he said

He signed off in jaunty fashion though: “I’ll be seeing you at some ribbon cuttings.”

Obama gave a wide-ranging on-the-record interview last week with five political columnists, including E.J. Dionne from the Washington Post. (The full transcript is now available.) His remarks about bank nationalization have gotten most of the ink so far, but also he made some very salient and smart remarks about infrastructure spending. We’ve pulled them out of the larger transcript and highlighted statements that seem to be of particular note. In short: he wanted to make the smart grid a bigger item than it was; it sounds like he wants to make some major (and much needed) changes in the next transportation bill; and he still wants an infrastructure bank–an idea he floated during the campaign.

On why there wasn’t as much infrastructure as he might have liked: “[With] infrastructure, you get probably the biggest multiplier effect — for every dollar you spend you might get $1.50 worth of demand out there, but necessarily you can’t get all those infrastructure projects done within a two-year time frame and the start-ups may be longer.”

On why there wasn’t as much smart grid funding as he might have liked: One of the things I was pushing for hard was can we get the entire smart grid done, and it turns out that actually, historically, a lot of these lines are laid by private companies, so we couldn’t spend as much as you would think on that part of infrastructure, but we have kick-stared it in the package.

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This exchange is from a town hall meeting today in Fort Myers, Florida. The questioner is a local politician. It’s a great moment:

1:07 p.m.: Question: How can you help with infrastructure and transportation?

OBAMA [actual answer]: Well, we targeted billions of dollars at infrastructure spending. And states all across the country are going through what Florida is going through. There was a study done by the American Association of Engineers — that might not be the exact title — but engineers from all across the country. We get a D in infrastructure all across the country.

We saw what happened in Minneapolis, where a bridge collapsed and resulted in tragedy. And not only do we need to rebuild our roads, our bridges, our ports, our levees… our dams. But we also have to plan for the future. This the same example of turning crisis into opportunity. This should be a wake-up call for us.

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