"...citizens of the Golden State have stood up consistently for two principles: the state should provide vastly more services to its citizens, and citizens should pay vastly less to the state."
-Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times
The conservative Law of Unintended Consequences is at work in the new Obama-Duncan education proposal, which demands that states link teachers' evaluations and pay to students' test scores...
He's so plainly a socialist in economic affairs, but when it comes to education, he's trying to inject free market principles into an intrinsically socialist system...
You know who else was really good at alienating the base of his party fairly early on? Jimmy Carter.
Things turned out well for his presidency, don't you think?
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?
I'm puzzled as to why the Governor doesn't just use his line-item veto to balance the budget. The thing that the Legislature sent to him is not remotely balanced. It's at least $3 billion out of whack. He's not running for re-election in 2010. The California GOP will never nominate him for another political office again. Why not go for it? Slash the budget with his gubernatorial pen and stop posing in front of cameras with the Crocodile Dundee can-opener...
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the always excellent Peggy Noonan eloquently captured the essence of my loathing for Obama's health care reform proposals. Her words articulated a basic libertarian resistance to the philosophical core of what Obama, Pelosi, and their limousine liberal ilk would inflict upon the rest of us if we let them. As Noonan says,
"We are living in a time when educated people who are at the top of American life feel they have the right to make very public criticisms of...the private, pleasurable but health-related choices of others. They shame smokers and the overweight. Drinking will be next. Mr. Obama's own choice for surgeon general has come under criticism as too heavy."
"Only a generation ago, such criticisms would have been considered rude and unacceptable. But they are part of the ugly, chafing price of having the government in something: Suddenly it can make very big and personal demands on you. Those who live in a way that isn't sufficiently healthy 'cost us money' and 'drive up premiums.' Mr. Obama himself said something like it in his press conference, when he spoke of a person who might not buy health insurance. If he gets hit by a bus, 'the rest of us have to pay for it.'"
"Under a national health-care plan we might be hearing that a lot. You don't exercise, you smoke, you drink, you eat too much, and 'the rest of us have to pay for it.'"
"It is a new opportunity for new class professionals (an old phrase that should make a comeback) to shame others, which appears to be one of their hobbies...Every time I hear Kathleen Sebelius talk about 'transitioning' from 'treating disease,' to 'preventing disease,' I start thinking of how they'll use this as an excuse to judge, shame, and intrude."
"So this might be an unarticulated public fear: When everyone pays for the same health-care system, the overseers will feel more and more a right to tell you how to live, which simple joys are allowed and which are not."
"Americans in the most personal, daily ways feel they are less free than they used to be. And they are right, they are less free."
"Who wants more of that?"
