The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama will be our first president whose heritage is from the central cities since Grover Cleveland, who left the office in 1897. Prior to becoming president, Cleveland had been a reform mayor of Buffalo, and then governor of New York. I think they missed one: Theodore Roosevelt grew up in New York City and represented part of the city in the legislature. But presidents since then have been from suburbs or small towns.

Obama, however, was born in Honolulu, went to school in Jakarta, Los Angeles, and New York, and got his famous job as a community organizer in Chicago. His only “suburban” time was getting his law degree in Cambridge, MA.

From one perspective, the war on sprawl is really a war between central cities and suburbs. The central cities see the suburbs growing and want some of that growth (and the tax revenues that come with it) for themselves. By demonizing the suburbs, at the very least they have a chance to grab more than their share of federal and state funds for housing and transportation.

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Remember when TreasSec Henry Paulson got down on his knee to beg Nancy Pelosi to support his $700 billion recovery plan? He said he would use the money to buy mortgage securities in order to set a floor on their value and restore faith to the credit markets. Treasury Department wonks talked about reverse Dutch auctions and other fancy ways of making sure that the bailout would succeed and maybe even earn a profit for taxpayers.

Immense pressure was put on Congress to pass the bill authorizing Paulson’s plan. “If there is even the slightest chance it will work,” one congressman said, “we should do it.”

Now, a mere seven weeks after Paulson bent his knee, not only is there not the slightest chance it will work, there is not even the slightest chance that Paulson is going to do it. Paulson now admits that “it was clear to me” as early as October 3, the date the President signed the bailout bill, “that purchasing troubled assets” would not work. But he waits almost six weeks to tell us?

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Remember those transit agencies that are in trouble because of the credit crisis? It turns out this is all the fault of “public-private partnerships.” At least, that’s what U.S. Representatives James Oberstar (who chairs the House Transportation Committee) and Peter DeFazio (who chairs the Highways and Transit Subcommittee) said in a letter to Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters last week.

Recall that transit agencies decided to exploit a loophole in federal tax law (since closed) that allowed them to “leverage” their capital investments to get an extra 3 percent out of those investments. They “sold” their capital investments to some bank, then leased them back. The banks would get to depreciate those investments on their taxes (which the transit agencies, not being taxpayers, couldn’t do), saving about $6 million out of $100 million. They split the savings with the transit agencies.

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