Politics is not the problem for the NY-DC-Boston Acela corridor. It is the cost of urban real estate in the area (and the difficulty in forcing the sale of it if you could afford it) to provide the straight lines required for high speed travel. The TGV is largely crossing farmland between the big cities. Politics may have more of an impact in other areas, but, frankly, a lot of the proposed routes don't make much sense to me. Only DC-Chicago-NY, Houston-Dallas-Austin and maybe SF-LA. Otherwise, the traffic just isn't there. If between two given cities there are only one or two flights a day, how can they be expected to fill a train every hour?