The editorial board of the Washington Post has responded to Tuesday’s Virginia primary:
The results set the stage for what should be a sharp debate over the critical questions facing the state: first and foremost, fiscal policy and how to improve Virginia’s badly inadequate transportation system.
Both major party tickets fall short on answering these “critical questions,” according to the editorial, but amazingly the Post doesn’t see what several Virginia papers have seen–the Russ Potts solution.
With that easy answer not on the table, the Post offers this prescription:
Virginia needs a serious dialogue about how to raise the tens of billions of dollars needed for transportation over the next decade or two.
That’s the ticket–serious dialogue, not the whimsical dialogues we’ve been having all these years. This transportation problem is only now getting bad!
I’m starting to believe that it’s the editorial boards, not the candidates, who are avoiding the serious dialogue and tough choices. It’s easy for an editor in an air conditioned office to proclaim that transportation needs tens of billions more dollars. It’s a lot tougher for a candidate to choose Coalfields Expressway over Route 29 bypass, or rail to Dulles over widening Rt. 66 in Arlington, or the hundred other choices presented as they campaign across the state. It’s easy to call for spending money to repair bridges deemed inadequate by a national study; it’s harder to face voters stuck in traffic jams for months while the work is performed, and then longer when inevitably the project goes over budget or additional problems are discovered.