Palin defended bridge to 'spinmeisters'

[RedEarth]

Sarah Palin supported the “bridge to nowhere” long after it had become an icon of wasteful federal spending.

By the time she held up a T-shirt proclaiming her support for the bridge during her 2006 campaign for governor, it already had been derided across the Lower 48 as a monument to waste — including by Palin’s current running mate, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Palin was campaigning for the votes of Alaskans who wanted the bridge and who felt aggrieved by all the criticism it had attracted. The shirt’s message said she was one of them, not one of those critics who didn’t even know the local ZIP code. This was tiny Ketchikan, the “nowhere” to be reached by the bridge — or as the T-shirt defiantly proclaimed, this was “NOWHERE ALASKA 99901.”

Just in case there was any doubt about her position, Palin — who grew up in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley — used some local slang, declaring, “OK, you’ve got valley trash standing here in the middle of nowhere. I think we’re going to make a good team as we progress that bridge project.”

In fact, Palin supported two Alaska bridges: the planned Gravina Island Bridge and its even costlier sister, the Knik Arm Bridge. The congressional fight over them had come during a time of indictments and guilty pleas for lobbyists and lawmakers. The parade of convictions left the clear impression that corruption in Washington was spiraling out of control and that pork barrel spending was at the heart of it.

The bridges even triggered an acrimonious debate on the Senate floor in November 2005, four months after Congress had approved a $454 million down payment for them. The donnybrook was prompted by Hurricane Katrina, which had destroyed one of New Orleans’ most critical bridges. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) tried but failed to push through an amendment to divert Alaska’s bridge money to help rebuild the New Orleans bridge.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13818.html