POLITICAL POTPOURRI
K-12: Monday’s Oregonian editorial said it best. K-12 graduation standards “…only work when they’re connected to a fully functioning school system – one with qualified teachers, defensible class sizes and adequate funding. If Oregon wants to have any real standards for its graduates, it needs to reinvest in its public schools…”
How true. Unfortunately the editorial writers of our state’s paper of record are still transfixed by the idea of high stakes tests, including proficiency tests for graduation. And our state board of education wants to add to the list of required courses in English and math while considering tiered diplomas.
Again, the cart is before the horse in these discussions. If you have high quality teachers, small class sizes and adequate funding – you will get good educational outcomes – just as the post WW II generation did in most cases. We met the challenge of Sputnik not by high stakes testing but by investing in K-12 education and higher ed.
What we need is a governor who will to make such an investment in our future.
Now which one of the three in the arena do you think is up to that task? Democrat Ted Kulongoski, Republican Ron Saxton or Independent Ben Weslund?
Here’s the choices: an incumbent who has been saying for 4 years – wait until my second term. The past chair of the Portland Public school system that is barely on life support? Or a state legislator who has chaired the Joint Ways & Means Committee and is willing to think outside the box about funding?
Autocracy: Syndicated columnists, Robyn Blumner and George Will offered contrasting views of the state of the nation in Monday’s Oregonian. Blumner rails against the current administration’s seemingly inexorable increase of power while the Congress slips into oblivion.
She argues that the Congress is “…MIA. They have handed the game board to Bush and he has taken it and gone home. He now controls his pieces and theirs. But it wasn’t their game to give away. It was ours…”
She reminds us that the Founders reasoned that liberty could only be protected by a system of checks and balances system where as Madison said “ambition would check ambition.” Well somewhere along the post-9/11 roadmap, the Congress had a testosterone loss. It's lost its will to perform its constitutional duty.
We live in an Orwellian society of warrantless wiretaps and a nationwide system of data mining with no clear restrictions except the assurances by the former head of our top spy agency NSA, soon to be the head of CIA – that “probable cause” determines how far the government snoops.
Now isn’t that reassuring? When the fox is in the hen house, he then warns the assembled masses that only if “probable cause” exits will he eat you! Question, whose “probable cause?” I thought that was for the courts to determine, not the NSA, CIA, FBI…
But dear old George Will assures us all is well with the Republic. In a column titled “Liberalism’s new civil war” he waxes eloquently about the latest power struggle within the ranks of modern liberalism. Funny, Will is not a liberal, unless you’re talking about the 18th century version thereof. So why does he care?
He talks about some obscure fellow, Peter Beinart, editor at large of the New Republic – once a bastion of 20th century liberalism but more recently a captive of more centrist DLC types. According to Will, Beinart “excavates” how a virile liberalism can win the war of terror and make the USA stand tall again.
Beinart argues that muscular liberalism that took the USA through the Cold War era began in 1947 when “liberal anti-totalitarians convened at the Willard [a famous hotel and watering hole in downtown DC] to found Americans for Democratic Action.”
According to the Beinart thesis, the ADA mission impossible was to rescue liberalism from the clutches of what Arnold would term “girlie man” libs like Henry Wallace and other progressives at the time who were not too hot to engage the Soviets in the so-called Cold War.
Beinart according to Will then connects the dots between mamby pamby libs of the ‘40s to their ilk today – the George McGoverns to the Michael Moores. These “doughfaces” (a term attributed to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) flinch from the ‘fact’ that “…America could not have built schools for Afghan girls had it not bombed the Taliban first…”
Ironic factoid. NPR interviewed two male teachers in Afghanistan this morning whose lives have been threatened by the “remnants” of the Taliban for teaching ideas antithetical to the Taliban’s restricted version of Islam. If the USA “kicked butt” so well 3 years ago, why is the Taliban so robust now? Afghan girls and boys are not that safe and neither are their teachers!
Beinart argues, according to Will that “…liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America’s mission at home and abroad…” The McGoverns and Moores like isolationists of the right in the ‘30s want to distance themselves from the world.
But Beinart admits he was wrong about supporting the invasion, wrong about Saddam, wrong in giving up on containment of Iraq and wrong about the Bush team’s competence. Bush et al are guilty of hubris and impatience.
Echoing Blumner, Beinart argues that Bush “…has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak…”
But Beinart worries that today’s "doughfaces" in the Democratic party will repeat the errors of ’72 – ’76 in ’06 and ’08 given the rise of the Deaniacs. Will cites the famous line of McGovern’s ’72 acceptance speech during the "sunrise service" in Miami – “Come home, America”.
Will misrepresents McGovern’s message in doing so. McGovern was not embracing retreat from the world, he was simply asking Americans to return to basic principles of governance – respect for the loyal opposition, quit spying on Americans, quit lying about the reasons for war, quit spending our human treasure and money in a war that was a quagmire.
It’s time we again, came home America. Beinart and Will misread history. But then again, that’s what neo-cons do even when they admit their mistakes. They keep on making them! Funny, George Will never went to war, George McGovern did. McGovern was a decorated bomber pilot in WW II in the German theater.
Talk is cheap for George Will, just like it is for Dick Cheney.
Nonpartisan Primaries: The public commission on reforming the legislature is cranking out its recommendations. They’ve officially endorsed moving to annual legislative sessions; adopting open primaries, which allow independents to vote; and/or having a non-partisan primary.
The problem is that open primaries and non-partisan primaries are two different types of primary elections. Oregon’s two major political parties can opt for an open primary any time they want to. Both have played the game of allowing, then disallowing (a closed primary) independents to vote in their primary.
However, a non-partisan primary is a radical change. It pits all candidates for the same office at all levels – local, state and federal against each other.
If a non-partisan primary had been in effect several weeks ago – Ron Saxton, Kevin Mannix, Jason Atkinson, Ted Kulongoski, Peter Sorenson, Jim Hill and Ben Westlund plus minority party candidates from the Libertarian, Green and Reform parties would have all been in the race for governor.
The top two candidates would emerge from the field for the November runoff election. Theoretically, two Ds or two Rs might face off in the general election. It’s all about the math of plurality voting. Given the anemic turnout in May, this might have added some zest to the contest.
Who do you think would have won such a wide-open election this time around?
However, there is a downside to non-partisan elections (though RAD has reluctantly thrown in the towel because things are so dysfunctional is Salem and favors them).
Candidates with name familiarity and big money will have an advantage. Organization will also be important. This naturally gives PACs a huge roll in the game. The unions that didn’t engage in May would be forced to pick a winner then and hope their guy is among the top two. There will be nothing cheap about these non-partisan battles.
RAD hopes that if we do pass a non-partisan primary that the ballot will show the party affiliation of the candidates as well as which candidates have secured a party endorsement (if any). Removing party labels denies voters important information or cues.
Finally, while the intent of the proponents of non-partisan primaries – former Secretary’s of State Norma Paulus (GOP) and Phil Keisling (Dem) et al – to bring more moderates into the legislature – the challenge of leadership in such a legislature will be daunting.
You will still have party caucuses and partisanship factored into the organization of the legislature as the leadership is chosen and committee assignments are made. That inevitable and necessary. But hopefully, the politics of this will be less poisonous that it has been in recent years.
But parties will be weakened and with that the institutional memory of the legislature will shift to the lobby, agency heads and the erstwhile media who cover Salem inside the beltway. The hope is that with moderates in control, ideology will decline and comity will rule. Gridlock will end. We’ll see when the new reality hits Salem, if it passes the voters sniff test in November.
But there will be winners and losers in this game. As with past reforms business interests will see their already sizeable political stock go up, unions will lose. The upper middle class voters will gain, working poor will lose. Why – because money talks in elections. And those who have the money to spend will be rewarded, as they always are.
Reforms always have their costs.
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