Deputy Managing Penny Brown • 202-355-1154 Editor ( pbrown@trafficworld.com)

Shortfall

So did you really want transportation to take a more prominent

role in national politics?

From logistics managers to carriers and road builders, the transportation world has long lamented that the serious, nitty-gritty issues of infrastructure, goods movement and their impact on the country’s economy were invisible when it came to the national political debate.

But transportation flared in national politics in a big way in recent weeks, and we’re not sure everyone is the better for it.

The higher profile incident, of course, came in Ohio, where the McCain and Obama campaigns got into a verbal sparring match over, of all things, DHL’s restructuring of its North American express operations.

There were no cameras around to document the other meeting point for national politics and transport, but it could have a far greater impact on the way freight moves around the country.

The Senate essentially gave up attempts to plug a shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund. Despite a 387-37 vote in the House to send $8 billion to the fund, the Senate simply failed to act, leaving a measure many believe is critical to keeping highway projects running to founder.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that was because Americans are “clamoring” instead for congressional action to bring down gas prices. Gasoline prices have fallen 37 cents a gallon in about a month, so what McConnell calls a “crisis” became about 8 percent less of a crisis without Congress doing much of anything at all.

But Senate Republicans aren’t shrugging off the deficit in the Highway Trust Fund because of the high price of gasoline. They’re not interested in moving the mea-

sure because the last highway bill, because of its bloated earmarks, became a national laughingstock. With the elections just a couple of months away, there’s a bigger political payoff for McConnell and others in stopping a relatively small spending bill than in solving a very solvable problem.

That’s the prominent role highway spending has taken in the Senate campaigns.

Politics isn’t much prettier in Ohio.

John McCain was beaten up there over the impending loss of some 8,000 jobs in Wilmington as DHL shifts its express business away from the airport over to UPS. An advertisement for the Barack Obama campaign scored McCain for helping in the Senate to “pave the way for foreign-owned DHL to take over an American shipping company.”

But DHL isn’t scaling back its U.S. operations because of McCain’s legislative support of the company in 2005. McCain advisor Rick Davis was a lobbyist for DHL as it worked for approval of its purchase of Airborne Express, but people are not losing jobs because of Davis’s work, nor DHL’s purchase of Airborne.

Here’s why DHL and its parent Deutsche Post World Net are shifting U.S. cargo away from Wilmington: DHL is losing around $1 billion a year in the United States because it cannot compete economically with the service reach and economies of scale with FedEx and UPS.

Now if only a good debate on market forces would get a more prominent role in national politics.

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