Rep. John L. Mica is pumped up about the incoming Obama administration. The congressman is one of Capitol Hill's most ardent proponents of spending big bucks on high-speed rail projects, and he sees the president-elect as a kindred spirit.
Mica has been traveling along the Northeast Corridor, pushing a plan to promote high-speed rail technology that could cut the time of travel from Washington to New York to less than two hours.
The huge project would require an investment of billions of dollars on such things as replacing the ancient Amtrak tunnels through Baltimore - a significant drag on travel times along the East Coast.
Mica thinks his dream project will be a comfortable fit with Barack Obama's plans for stimulating the economy.
"I have to give Obama credit. I've heard him talking about infrastructure. We heard him talking about high-speed rail," Mica said. By contrast, the congressman said, the Bush administration was "somewhat myopic" about rail transportation.
Just what you'd expect to hear from a big-spending liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, right?
Maybe. But Mica is a self-described "hard-core Republican" - just re-elected to his ninth term from a Florida district that includes St. Augustine and Daytona Beach. As the ranking minority member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, he's part of a significant faction within the congressional GOP that could be described as "infrastructure Republicans."
It's a group with which Obama thinks he can find some common ground. He recently named one of their number, Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois, as his transportation secretary.
Mica sat down for an interview with me this month on what passes for high-speed rail in the United States these days - Amtrak's Acela train. I boarded at Penn Station and rode with the congressman to a news conference at Washington's Union Station, where he was to announce that the federal government had issued an invitation for Amtrak, state and local governments and the private sector to develop plans for high-speed rail from Boston to Washington and in 10 other corridors around the country.
The Acela on which we were riding averages 83 mph, but Mica and his congressional allies envision a system that will hit speeds of 250-300 mph.
High-speed rail is a notion that some transportation experts have dismissed as a huge waste of money. But Mica and his allies on both sides of the aisle got the go-ahead for planning written into a recent Amtrak bill.
