Obama: To Seem Rather Than To Be
There are numerous news reports which delineate the direction the Obama administration desires our country to go.
In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal Attorney General Eric Holder’s attack on tuition vouchers for minority children in Louisiana is described. This is an interesting situation which, I’m sure, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would find abysmal. Mr. Holder’s ostensible complaint is that minority children leaving public schools for other opportunities would harm the desegregation efforts of the public schools. What, one should ask, of the educational opportunity of the child? For Eric Holder and many of his ilk, the education of children is not important, statistical homogenization of races is? I would go further and in a different direction. Eric Holder and the US Attorneys General office wish to maintain control of school systems for the benefits they can direct to teachers unions and associations. The President nor his hired guns have made any efforts to help the average person of low income and means. In fact the opposite is true: when vouchers have offered the poor and downtrodden a way out of an economical dead end, the President is against it. Louisiana is the current case, but the same was true in Washington, DC where the voucher program was attacked by the White House.
This seems to be a normal course of action for liberals: this desire to control where someone goes to school and with whom they go to school, but it’s not because they want the children to have a good education. It is about political power and supporter teachers unions and the like.
Not so long ago, and perhaps even now, the bureaucrats and politicians associated with the Charlotte Mecklenburg School System were more concerned about racial statistics than about education. My involvement with local Mecklenburg politics taught me that the phrase “it’s for the children” was a misleading statement designed to attack anyone who desired a good education for all the children instead of directing money and spending at the friends of the political establishment. This statement was used most often when the crony capitalists were advocating more spending on buildings. However, if one actually wanted improvement in educational results, spending on buildings and new programs would be misdirected money, and so the liberal/crony capitalist leftist said “it’s for the children” which PROVED they were more concerned about the children. Twenty years later, when hundreds of thousands of children have moved from 1st grade through 12th, it is still not about the children but about money for the friends of politicians. Statistics and verbiage about black and white are designed to distract people from the truth about public education; that for the money spent the returns are poor.
The battle in Louisiana is no different: it is about control and money. If it was about education, vouchers would be advocated by all. The Obama White House, as typical leftists, say the right words but their actions tell the truth. But the President will tell us how concerned he is about the children. Sure he is; his own.
Congress, which as I write, is being fillibustered by Senator Ted Cruz, is another case. Their gold plated health care, to quote the headline, is about the actions of the political class to separate themselves from the people. Finding out after they read the 2,000 or so pages of ObamaCare, that they didn’t like how it treated Congress or congressional aides, the whiners, turned to Obama who decided, unilaterally and without legal authority, to which no one seems to object, to allow Congress and its aides to exempt themselves. When asked about this item in a townhall meeting, our local representative Patrick McHenry dissembled by saying he was on his wife’s insurance. But he didn’t answer the question, and deflected attention aware from the subject. Again, here is where Obama doesn’t care about the law or the people but about power and control and, the political class. He
had to keep Harry Reid and company happy.
Another place we find Obama’s leadership style is on the debt ceiling. Senator Orrin Hatch writes about how Obama refuses to negotiate on the debt ceiling. What is he willing to negotiate on? I know – Syria’s weapons of mass destruction; Libya’s revolt and Benghazi’s origins. President Obama is, if nothing else, an expect politician, so the debt ceiling is another way for him to win. But winning is not leading. Our country is in a dire economic and social situation. We have a long history of too many financial obligations such as pensions, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare growing to unsustainable amounts, which a good leader could help us work through. The debt ceiling debates would be a good place to have the conversations we need, to have the leadership which takes us through this juncture to a good end, but our President is more concerned with his late night TV appearances. That, it seems, is the issue: appearances.
Our President’s motto is: To Seem, NOT to be.
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