Not content with merely alienating every cop and doctor in the country, Obama made the time yesterday to antagonize a constituency utterly critical to his re-election...teachers.
Doctors and cops may trend Republican, but teachers, particularly public school teachers, are vital to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, which Obama may have noticed, he leads. Nobody gets nominated by the Democrats to run for anything, and nobody gets elected as a Democrat to do anything, without the support of teachers.
Yesterday, Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan (like most Education Secretaries, Arne has never spent Day One in a public school classroom as a teacher...he does however, play a lot of hoops with The One...), announced that they would allocate $4.3 billion in "grants" to those states whose educational systems link students' test scores with teachers' evaluations and pay. The One and his Lord High Stooge Arne explicitly took aim at teachers' unions in California and New York, demanding that those states change laws that preclude such linkage of students' test scores with teachers' evaluations and pay.
Such an imperious, if ill-considered, backhand from The One must be deeply disconcerting to the teachers' unions, populated as they are with devout Obamanauts. However, once they recover from the shock of public betrayal, their political vengeance is sure to be lethal to The One and his prospects in November 2012.
Obama needs California and New York to be re-elected. He does not carry those states if teachers and their unions sit on their hands and stay home in 2012. In what way does this latest assault on a large group of necessary voters reflect the political genius that allegedly is Obama?
