Editorial: Faith in the System

This was the year you’ll tell your grandchildren about. The presidential election of 2000 is one for the history books, and for all the sturm and drang about premature media calls on the outcome, hanging chads and legal contests at every level, the experience told volumes about the strength of the American system of government and our faith in it. Now all that remains is for the new president to make good on his pledge to address competing interests, unite the government and forge a consensus on how to proceed.

This also was the year you may want to recount to trucking’s newcomers how the industry’s political will turned back an imperfect regulatory proposal that would have fundamentally altered the way we do business, and in an unhealthy way. We all, truckers and regulators alike, should be able to head back to the drawing table in 2001 and craft new hours-of-service regulations that take into account what we have learned about individual patterns of work and rest through more than a decade of scientific study, not only in this country, but also in Canada and Australia, and apply it in such a way as to safeguard the growing productivity of trucking and actually make it safer for all in the bargain.

We have reason to expect that future regulatory regimes will be developed in consultation with trucking, not in spite of it, because President-elect George W. Bush has promised that’s the way things will work in Washington under his watch. We’ll hold him to it.

And we have reason to expect to have the new administration’s ear. Mr. Bush’s right-hand man, Andrew Card, who will be chief of staff, knows something about transportation. He served the president-elect’s father in numerous capacities, not the least of which was as secretary of transportation after the elder Bush plucked the previous DOT secretary, Sam Skinner, out of 400 7th Street S.W. and named him his chief of staff. After DOT, Mr. Card went on to head the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.

It also is worth noting that American Trucking Associations President Walter B. McCormick Jr. worked with Mr. Card at the Department of Transportation as DOT’s chief counsel before ATA discovered him. Yes, family ties count in Washington.

So, we survived Y2K and learned that we are not yet the slaves of our machines. We learned that an industry united can have a strong measure of control over our own destinies. And we learned that these are great times in which to be alive and flourishing. After all, it’s the American way.