President Joe Biden visits Pittsburgh today for the second time to tout his administration’s historic investment in infrastructure.
It’s an opportunity for the president to shift focus back to his most prominent success, and away from the lingering malaise of inflation, the coronavirus and a derailed Build Back Better plan.
Here in Pittsburgh, a nearly billion-dollar investment in the Upper Ohio Navigation Project has already been announced. The funds will go to modernizing crumbling locks and dams to keep our rivers navigable for tens of millions of tons of barge traffic each year. It’s money well spent, not only for the one-time construction jobs it will create but also the employment it will sustain.
It’s exactly the kind of success Mr. Biden should take pride in. Despite the negativity surrounding the administration right now, the infrastructure bill alone should be considered a signature, even presidency-defining accomplishment.
Mr. Biden is at his best when he is talking, and pursuing, brass-tacks issues. Build Back Better has stalled, but a more pragmatic, less ideological approach — the kind of politics Mr. Biden has mastered — could revive it. We hope it will.
Today’s main event will take place at Mill 19 in Hazelwood Green, a venue that has become a favorite of national and international leaders: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo played host to a joint U.S.-EU trade summit at the site back in September. And during the presidential campaign, then-candidate Biden visited the same brownfield development.
Politicians of all stripes like to use Mill 19 as a backdrop: It represents, almost perfectly, the old and new Pittsburgh economy. The high-tech offices of autonomous vehicle and robotics research offices literally inhabit the husk of a steel mill.
It’s a useful metaphor for Mr. Biden’s economic policies. But Mill 19 also represents a broader hope for a politics of solidarity in the wake of the Trump presidency, the murder of George Floyd and the COVID pandemic, which have accelerated the nation’s seismic shift toward polarization and alienation.
The steel I-beams at Mill 19 may no longer serve the purpose they once did, but that doesn’t mean they are useless. There is still strength in them, and now they support walls of glass where innovations are born that were science fiction when those beams were first cast.
History need not be obliterated to accommodate the present and future. Living and thriving together isn’t about discarding everything — and everyone — that doesn’t seem to fit; it’s about creating a society where as many people, no matter their age, race or ability, can fit just as they are.
Maybe that’s another lesson from Hazelwood Green that Mr. Biden can bring back to Washington.
First Published: January 28, 2022, 5:00 a.m.
