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COPYRIGHT 2008 All Rights Reserved
BYLINE: Ari Natter
Introducing Mary Peters in the Senate after her nomination to be transportation secretary, Sen. John S. McCain referred to his fellow Arizonian''s former career as a hog butcher.
"She made her living by cutting pork," McCain told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in 2006.
"This background should come in very handy," McCain said. "I urge her to rely heavily on her past pork-cutting experience as she works to carry out her new responsibilities."
Cutting pork-barrel spending has been a career-long crusade for McCain, and he''s frequently put federal transportation funding on the block. That hasn''t always endeared the Arizona senator to transportation interests.
"McCain - his take on infrastructure is that it is all pork," John Horsley, executive director of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, said this year during a conference at the National Press Club.
As the United States heads toward choosing its first new president in eight years on Nov. 4, transportation, logistics and infrastructure groups are poring over the records of presumptive party nominees McCain on the Republican side and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on the Democratic side with new urgency. The high-stakes game is aimed partly at mapping out the possible transportation policies of a new administration under either candidate. More significantly, however, it''s aimed at filling in the transportation gaps for each candidate and setting policy planks more firmly to turn them into action plans next January.
For now, McCain is working hard to counter the perception that to him transportation and infrastructure begin and end as pork.
And despite his record of opposition to what he says is excessive or unnecessary transportation spending,...
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