The Conservative Soldier

David Broder. James Carville. Maureen Dowd. Thomas Frank. Peggy Noonan.

These are not folks you will find wandering around a Tea Party rally. These are elite pundits, authors and former White House insiders who, on January 20, 2009, were either overcome with joyous emotion or, at the very least, ideologically aligned with the transformational inauguration of The One, Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States.

Dowd (New York Times), Frank (Wall Street Journal) and Carville (CNN and former Bill Clinton advisor) write/comment from the far left and bask in their enlightened elitism. Broder (Washington Post) and Noonan (Wall Street Journal and former Reagan speechwriter) are considered moderate, less agenda driven than some in the D.C.-New York corridor.

In recent days, all have expressed concern, disappointment, frustration, even outrage, toward the current state of the Obama Administration. Some have concluded, to paraphrase, that Obama might not have what it takes to do the job. For most on the list, this marks a first.

Anyone who has watched or been subjected in everyday life to the realities of Illinois and Chicago politics (read Liberal Democrat controlled cronyism and corruption) probably saw this coming. The Chicago Way was uniquely capable of elevating a former community organizer from the streets to the U.S. Senate. Then, despite his relative obscurity, the Chicago Way kept building momentum for their man all the way to the White House.

Now, the boundless optimism that swept over Grant Park on Election Night 2008 is replaced by stunned disbelief toward the unraveling of the Obama Era (Rasmussen Reports: Obama 53% disapproval. Gallup: 47% approval, down from 64% a year ago), hastened by his failure to demonstrate leadership amid the BP oil spill catastrophy.

“He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation,” writes the Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz, “because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class.”

Not by coincidence, many in that class are themselves falling into disarray. Individuals who might have expected to be politically entrenched heading into the fall elections are on the ropes, including Governor Pat Quinn, U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (IL-9th).

In a recent poll of likely Illinois voters by Rasmussen, 57% somewhat or strongly (34%) disapprove of Quinn’s performance. In the same poll, Obama insider Giannoulias trails Republican opponent  and U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (IL-10th) 42%-39%. Kirk led 46-38 at the end of April. He is losing ground because of inaccuracies about his military service allowed to stand uncorrected for years. And Schakowsky is facing scrutiny for her support of a largely ignored federal bailout of Chicago’s ShoreBank, a micro-financing institution to which Obama & Co. have longstanding ties, as well as her recent praise for White House correspondent Helen Thomas. Thomas resigned this week on the heels of an anti-Semitic rant. Only a few weeks ago, she had appeared with Schakowsky as a featured speaker at a fundraiser.

As leaders of Chicago’s failed bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games discovered, there is no guarantee that the Obama Effect will turn anything around. Quinn, Giannoulias and Schakowsky might even find themselves better off downplaying the President’s Chicago ties come November.

The Journal’s Thomas Frank, as hardened a left-winger as they come, expressed utter exasperation in his weekly column this week. “We are now experiencing the biggest environmental disaster in generations—a disaster, mind you, that follows hard on the heels of a campaign in which Mr. Obama’s opponents chanted, “Drill, baby, drill”—and yet the party of environmentalism is unable to make political capital out of it. What set of circumstances makes such a perverse outcome possible?”

Republican political candidates and their supporters are warned repeatedly about overconfidence. On the heels of game-changing victories for the right in Massachusetts (the “Kennedy seat”), Kentucky (primary winner Rand Paul), New Jersey and Virginia (gubernatorial wins by Conservatives), to name a few, Republicans still hear a drumbeat of apprehension.

The wrist wringers insist they cannot assume anything going into November, despite numerous signs their candidates will win back majorities in the House and Senate, or both.

But it appears the wrists are about to enjoy a well-deserved rest. Barack Obama and fellow radicals are nearing panic mode. What else might explain Obama’s cross-country fly-in to pump up high rollers who back California Sen. Barbara Boxer? In the midst of domestic crisis on many fronts, Obama appeared with the San Francisco liberal Democrat who famously scolded a Brigadier General for omitting her title during a hearing.

Boxer is in trouble. Polls show likely Republican opponents trailing her by just 9-11 points, and it’s only May. This fall, the General likely will still be wearing his stars. Will Boxer still be a scolding Senator?

The Scolder in Chief, Obama, is meanwhile emerging as the inexperienced lightweight he was feared to be. Unemployment. The Gulf oil rig disaster. A weak housing market. Illegal immigration anger. Growing realization that ObamaCare is a sham. It’s actually hard to believe his approval rating is as high as it is (42%).

Yet, what might do in Obama faster than all of the above is the story of a Democrat Senate candidate from Pennsylvania who dared contest a 2010 primary against turncoat Sen. Arlen Specter. Joe Sestak says someone inside the Obama White House offered him a high profile job to drop out of that primary. (He refused, and won).

Suddenly the Obama worshipping mainstream media is starting to follow this story. If Sestak’s account turns out to be accurate, a federal crime was committed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The very existence of teachers’ unions makes my blood boil. But I approach the breaking point when a union operative calls for sweeping measures and more spending because, after all, it’s “for the children”.

Are their demands for perpetual pay raises for the children? How about the medical benefits, which are the envy of countless other professions? How about the crushing pension obligations? Are those for the kids?

The president of the American Federation of Teachers took up one third of the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion page Thursday morning pleading for a $23 billion federal bailout of the nation’s schools. Care to venture a guess as to her rationale?

When teachers begin losing jobs in cash- and revenue-strapped districts (joining some who’ve already been terminated), writes Randi Weingarten, the resulting trend “could rob an entire generation of students of the well-rounded education they need and deserve.”

And so goes the eternal argument from the entitlement addicted education community, voiced by its unions: If we fail to continue to throw money at public school systems, gushers of cash born of rising property taxes and other taxes, then we forsake our children and imperil our nation’s future.

“The federal government didn’t let Wall Street fail,” Weingarten observes. “Why would we do less for our public schools, which undeniably are too important to fail?”

She’s right about the schools, so let’s cut to the chase about who deserves what in this scenario. If there must be a bail out, the place to drill for crude is not the federal government, which is obviously tapped dry. Let the bail out be orchestrated by the caring teachers and school administrators, the ones who are deeply troubled that our kids won’t get what they deserve. Weingarten’s formula conveniently overlooks the fact that unions are sitting on mountains of pension funds and discretionary lobbying cash, accumulated across years of two-handed grabbing of taxpayer dollars.

As noted by Townhall magazine in an April piece entitled, “Everything But Education”, the National Education Association, the nation’s oldest and largest teachers’ union, “ranked as the nation’s single-biggest contributor to state-level and federal campaigns, political parties and ballot measures between 2007 and 2008, spending more than $56 million.” This is more than the combined contributions of a behemoth holy troika of labor unions — the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and SEIU (Service Employees International Union).

Considering that there are teachers’ unions in which individuals have embezzled more money than some school boards would need to return to educational solvency and save jobs, it is the height of disingenuous logic to decry the financial crisis in public education without offering to stop it with these treasure troves of union funds.

Meanwhile, don’t think for a minute that school districts have truly considered “cutting into the bone”, as Weingarten contends in the Journal. A March 2010 study published by the Cato Institute found that public schools are spending 93 percent more than the estimated median private school in the five largest metro areas and Washington, D.C.

Writes Cato’s Adam Schaeffer, “Since runaway education spending is a major cause of current and future budget problems, it is the best place to look in state and local budgets for serious savings.”

Teachers discover early in their careers that it’s almost always a mistake to underestimate the children, both in terms of learning potential and b.s. detection.

The time has come for teachers’ unions, administrators, educators and school boards to cease underestimating the taxpaying public and its enormous capacity to see through the myths unions attempt to perpetuate as they dig deeper for our last dollars.

Reduce public school spending and de-fang the bloated unions. Then we can have an honest discussion about who really cares about the children.