Sen. Lautenberg played bare-knuckled politics for transportation issues
Skift Take
Airlines weren't happy with Lautenberg for his advocacy of tarmac-delay rules, but Amtrak, other mass transit groups, and the organized labor that makes tourism and transportation move loved him.
What kind of guy and transportation advocate was Frank Lautenberg, the five-term U.S. Senator from New Jersey and liberal icon who died on Monday at age 89?
Lautenberg, who will be buried today, was unpretentious and, for a veteran politician, even strangely awkward at times in the limelight, says Mark Mogel, a Republican and former research director of FlyersRights.org, who worked for years with Lautenberg and other Senators to ultimately turn proposed airline tarmac-delay rules into law in 2011.
Mogel produced an email yesterday from 2007, describing how FlyersRights wanted to draft a press release praising Lautenberg for his support of the three-hour tarmac delay rule.
The hitch was that Senators Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, and Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, had introduced the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, which included tarmac delay protections, and Lautenberg's office didn't want to step on their toes in terms of publicity.
"Lautenberg didn't want to get in their way or take any of the credit," Mogel says. "Even when he was playing a much larger role in airline passengers' rights in the back rooms of the Senate, in the foreground he made it clear to us that Senators Boxer and Snowe should receive the accompanying public attention and accolades."
A politician,
