Biden, Obama helped keep 'Bridge to Nowhere' alive

DEWEY BEACH, Delaware (CNN) - Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden routinely mocks his Republican counterpart, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for her onetime support of the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," Biden and his running mate voted to keep the project alive twice.

Both Biden and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama voted to kill a Senate amendment that would have diverted federal funding for the bridge to repair a Louisiana span badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, Senate records show. And both voted for the final transportation bill that included the $223 million earmark for the Alaska project.

An amendment offered by Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn would have stripped the money appropriated to connect the Alaskan coastal city of Ketchikan to its airport on sparsely populated Gravina Island and diverted the money to Louisiana. But Biden, Obama and 80 of their colleagues rejected the measure, an amendment to a massive 2005 transportation bill that funded thousands of projects across the country.

"That is probably the most disturbing element of this and the campaigning on the Bridge to Nowhere," said Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, a taxpayer watchdog group.

The final version passed the Senate 93-1. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who has made his opposition to congressional "pork-barrel" spending a cornerstone of his campaign, did not vote either on the Coburn amendment or the final bill.