Originally Posted by wowitsdark

My guess about the Bridge to Nowhere is that Alaska asked for the full $400M to build it, but was only granted $200M in federal earmarks. It wasn't so important to Alaska that they were willing to foot the bill for the other half, so they told Washington that they were going to refuse the funding unless they would be allowed to spend it on another transportation project.

I also think it was a pet project of the Republican governor that she helped oust, and that perhaps she towed the company line prior to figuring out he was dirty she was for pretty much whatever her party was for. Then she figured out he was corrupt and as part of cutting him out of politics, she was cutting ties to the projects he'd pushed.

The reason I say this is because they've said she was for it before she was governor. That tells me that it wasn't *her* project, and yet the word came down that they'd been included in an earmark bill *after* she was in office. She went from being someone who could speak in theoretical terms (Yeah, that sounds like a good thing!) to having the pen that would have to sign off on spending $200M of Alaska's money to make that bridge a reality.

Things are a lot different when the buck stops with you. And she turned down the funding prior to being on the VP short list, so the decision to do so wasn't politically motivated. Or if it was, it would've been for her Alaska politics, not national politics.