An interesting post from Jack Balkin on liberals and Bush, though one that assumes that Bush, or at least Karl Rove, is as clever as Jack is, which is possible but unlikely. The basic point–that liberals should think of Bush less as a right-wing ideologue (especially on economic issues) and more as a politician trying to build a solid coalition for reelection–is quite apt. As I’ve suggested before, though, liberals can actually take advantage of Bush’s lack of interest in small government and free markets to gain some policy victories, and Ted Kennedy already has with regard to education spending.
This one, by the way, still baffles me. I keep seeing references in liberal blogs and by liberal commentators to how evil “no child left behind” is because, while it spends lots more money on education, it spends it on the wrong things–centralized dictates from Washington, education bureaucracy, formal testing standards. Yet I distinctly remember that in the 1980s, these were exactly the objections conservatives had to liberal proposals to help education–that they would federalize what had always been a flexible, local system, that they would feed the bureacracy instead of helping students, that testing is no substitute for actual learning. (Some) liberals have now adopted what were (and still are) conservative objections to what were once liberal proposals. Oh, and the objection I’ve seen from liberals that I really love is that “federal education spending is just a drop in the bucket, anyway,” even after Bush’s increases, so it doesn’t really matter. Cool! Let’s just abolish the DOE, then, and call it a day. (You know, $10 billion here, $10 billion there, and pretty soon we are talking about real money!)
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