Sorry for the title. My daughter and some innovative public education teachers have me speaking in Twitterease.
Here's the point:
The K-12 educational community in Michigan and the Michigan Democratic party woke up with a giant sized political headache this morning but they are doing their best to hide it -- it feels kind of like going to work with a bad hangover you don't want the boss to notice (not that that ever happened to me).
You see, last night POTUS (President of the United States) gave a ringing endorsement to Arne Duncan, education reform, "Race to the Top" legislation and, by extension, Governor Rick Snyder and the EAA, amongst other things.
The EAA, a now well documented educational nightmare, was made possible by Race to the Top legislation. That entity, the centerpiece of Governor Snyder's reform plans, has generated enormous resistance throughout the state and, indeed, has created a rather loose but energized coalition that is perhaps the only real obstacle to Snyder's re-election in 2014 and certainly a problem for a number of House seats and at least one Senate seat close to home: the 13th District.
When parents and teachers and advocates and others got together -- across a range of the political spectrum -- they discovered that they didn't like education reform. For many, like me, this impinged in an unhealthy way on very healthy local districts like BHSD. And it impinged on property values and sense of community. This linked folks, naturally, to Gov. Snyder's opponents: the Democratic Party. Many local Republicans realized their own party was potentially hurting them and were starting to listen -- if not exactly to a Democratic voice -- to serious concerns about Republican policies.
But last night President Obama said Governor Snyder is on just the right track with things like the EAA, and so this morning's sick feeling.
Lon Johnson, the MI Democratic party head believes the Dems can win or make gains in November 2014.
His reasoning is not bad: Michigan is still just barely a Democratic state. All they need is 51% of the vote and if he can get the African-American women that came out in 2012 for Obama to come out -- like they didn't for Lansing's Mayor Virg in 2010 -- Dems can move forward.
The problem, of course, is Nov. 2014 is not a Presidential election year. And Obama is not running. Those voters might come out for the first female President in 2016, but doubtful they will come out for Mark Schauer. They might have come out for the electric Gretchen Whitmer, but she opted, understandably, to focus on her own kids and not divisive Michigan politics.
The Dems, then, need the educational community and its loose coalition that cross circuits all kind of political lines, including parents waking up to school funding disasters, etc., to supplement their vote.
Last night POTUS did not help. In fact, it was something of a disaster here and elsewhere.
And neither will sweeping the Obama/Snyder partnership on public education reform under the Democratic table help. Many on the right, of course, don't like Snyder's Obama like agenda, but there won't be enough to abandon the Governor, I think, to offset the loss of energy.
One guy who seems to get this, ironically, is Tom McMillen, the anti-public education right winger from Rochester from Rochester who at today's House Education Committee on teacher evaluations said "local control" so many times a new drinking game was invented: every time you hear it take a shot and count a swing vote in Oakland County for the 13th District Senate seat.
MI Dems need to act fast. At the moment, they have no real way to differentiate the positions of POTUS from the Governor on education.
That said, for regular readers of this Blog, this will probably be my last post on Patch. I will be moving the Blog as of tomorrow or the next day, after one or two final posts.
