Food for thought about the 2012 Election
Many educators are not happy with President Obama, most especially his education policy, and Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan. The conventional wisdom is they will be “triangulating” (moving to the center) for the 2012 re-election campaign. Daily Kos has a piece analyzing the numbers, and arguing that he would do better to shore up his base of support, Daily Kos: 2012: Why President Obama needs to cover his base to win re-election.
As we know, there were many educators who were active in Obama’s last campaign, that are no longer supportive of his education policies. At the same time, however wishy-washy his support for collective bargaining rights like seniority, and tenure/due-process, we’ve all seen what the other side is promising.
The question I have, what is a better motivator to get teachers active in this election (and I mean really active, like in the last presidential election), is it fear (the other side is going to take away collective bargaining), or hope and change?
I just stumbled upon your blog and quite enjoy it! I’m trying to build my collection of educator blogs, and love getting differing viewpoints from all over!
Regarding your post, I think you do have one flaw in the logic: I don’t think that the governors of the various states that are hurting collective bargaining (such as Wisconsin and Indiana) are representative of the potential 2012 opponents to Pres. Obama (at least not the ones who are serious contenders, like Romney, Pawlenty, and Gingrich) would consider attacking unions, knowing the massive backlash that would come from such a a stupid move.
But in terms of getting teachers involved in the elections, if Pres. Obama wants their support, he needs to show that he takes education seriously. Personally, I haven’t seen him show that he takes *anything* seriously–he seems ridiculously reluctant to make any decisions on his own, and instead waits for everyone else to decide then jumps on the bandwagon. Not very inspiring, as far as leadership goes. So if he wants our support, he needs to give us something to support. In other words, we don’t want hope of change; we want actual change.
I think it’s WAY to soon to rule out some of those governors, OR to rule out that GOP contenders will jump on the anti-public union bandwagon.
On my first point, NPR piece, Barbour drops out, maybe to throw his support to Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who eliminated collective bargaining for state public workers (http://www.npr.org/2011/05/01/135891295/who-will-rise-to-the-top-of-the-gop-ticket). The piece also points out, there are no “front-runners” on the GOP ticket, so someone could come in from behind, including Daniels, or one of these other GOP governors.
My second point is more dependent on how some of these fights play out in Wisconsin, et. al., but we’ve already got a moderate former GOP State Senator here pushing public pension “reform”, so I think this could be an attractive issue to GOP candidates.
I think Obama does avoid specifics, but he did commit himself to health care reform, so he has done so in the past. I think he is committed to education reform, but is letting Duncan define the terms.