The event: We're all here to announce or witness the announcement of $7.8 million of stimulus money put toward the courthouse roof and the Gateway Arch's tram system. Political lip service was paid: Salazar says that repairing national landmarks and monuments like this helps America better tell her story to the world. "The Department of the Interior for me is the Department of the Americas." McCaskill says that she's happy to bring jobs to Missouri through the stimulus and that she's proud of the way the Interior is spending and tracking the money. Slay says he's a "big fan of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" like he's talking about Albert Pujols.

I ask Salazar how they came up with the $7.8 million number. How do we know the number isn't too high? Or too low? He says the National Park Service estimated the costs and that the projects have been sitting in a $9 billion backlog. (The Interior is throwing $1 billion of stimulus money at the backlog.) But he doesn't quite tell me how the National Park Service knew what to throw at the project. It's an understandable hole in his understanding; high-level Cabinet secretaries don't usually have to deal with cost estimates for small, local projects. But it's a question that hangs over all of these stimulus projects. Ignoring whether a project is worth money in the first place, how do we know how much money to spend on it?

The takeaway: Sometimes the stimulus can be as big a boon for politicians as it is for communities. Salazar gets to go on a road show and prove the Department of Interior is doing something to protect America's treasures. McCaskill gets to show she brought home jobs to Missouri by using her influence in Washington. Slay gets to trumpet his commitment to improving St. Louis' economy.

When another journalist asked Salazar how many shovel-ready jobs would be created, he didn't have an exact number. Today was about the politics, not the projects.