Beyond School

NCLB as a potential world epidemic

To riff off an old saw, “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” This is beyond obvious when we think of the Iraq invasion, the refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and countless other examples.

Less obvious, though, are the effects of American education policy on the world. The “standards and accountability” movement, exemplified most notoriously by No Child Left Behind, can appear to be a mostly domestic, purely American issue.

But that appearance is wrong.

For evidence, look no further than New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein’s recent visit to Australia – at the invitation of Australia’s Education Minister. Klein’s visit is stirring the same controversies in Australia that his policies have caused in the USA: should teacher unions be crippled? Should Australia look to the likes of Rupert Murdoch to privatize public education in the same way some Americans are looking to Bill Gates?

(We could extend this discussion to the encroachment of good ol’ American creationism and “Intelligent” Design into Australian science classrooms as well, but will leave that depressing subject for another post. My own secular warfare, here in Korea, with creationism edu-evangelists requires a stronger stomach and sense of humor than I have right now.)

Obama as education epidemiologist?

All of this points to the global importance of the incoming Obama administration’s education policies. Where will he stand on NCLB, on Charter Schools, on equity and finance and teacher tenure?

Cagey as ever, Obama has so far sent mixed signals. Pro-union, anti-privatizing advocates are heartened by his selection of progressive NCLB critic Linda Darling-Hammond as his education transition team manager, and hope he’ll follow up by appointing her Secretary of Education. But anti-union advocates who favor the likes of Klein and Washington D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee take hope in Obama’s stated support for expanding federal charter schools.

A closer inspection of Obama/Biden’s official education plan on Change.gov, though, suggests that progressives have more reasons to hope than the Klein-Rhee types. It seems to lay out reforms aiming at a “kinder, gentler,” more holistic NCLB. From the site:

Reform No Child Left Behind: Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. They will improve the assessments used to track student progress . . . and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB’s accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

A heretical close?

The other elements of the plan are encouraging and well worth the read, but – heresy warning - nowhere in the plan do we see any mention of the one issue that, in my view, the anti-union camp rightly raises: how to remove inept teachers from schools. Let’s be honest: we teachers have all worked with “omigod” colleagues we’d never want to inflict on a child.

Corey Bower writes a nicely pragmatic post about the tensions between protecting unions and eliminating undesirable teachers, in which he speculates,

I don’t think any union, or any union member, would argue that we should protect bad teachers. My guess is that [unions could support] some sort of provision that allowed for the dismissal of the worst teachers.

Speculation is all well and good – but does anybody have concrete examples of such a thing in their unions?¹

1. Add to TheIndyDebate map. [↩]

8 a.m. Sunday morning in Onyang, where Chosun era kings bathed in the local hot springs to cure themselves of all sorts of maladies, and I hope in a few minutes to do the same. (It ain’t all that great a place now, by the way, with its ugly commercial strips and other modern blights.)

Anyway, before I go, I want to quickly note that:

1. I wish there was a way I could keep the last post’s live puppy cam forever atop this blog’s homepage, and keep those six pups forever young, so I could spend as many hours watching them down the years as I have since discovering them a few days ago. They’ve so won me, I now check in with them first thing upon waking, several times during the day, and at night before retiring. (My wife and I had a rear-angle view of one of the pups pooping a couple nights ago, which warmed us almost as much as watching him and his siblings decide to eat it. It did look like a Tootsie Roll.)
2. When I embedded those pups in that post, my mind drifted to Michael Doyle and his science classroom in New Jersey, where I pictured monitors lined along a specimen shelf showing the live puppycam, and imagined live clamcams, chimpcams, sharkcams, and a vast 21st century menagerie of other biological wonders delivered live and free into his students’ lives via the wonders of Ustream.
3. I’ve already plugged Michael here before, and he seems as queasy about the weirdness of mutual admiration societies as I do (though I hope he also values the foundation of them, which is less biological than chemical and secularly spiritual), so I’ll just point to more recent (and excellent) testimonials calling for a wider readership of Michael’s Science Teacher blog at Nashworld and Barry Bachenheimer’s Plethora of Technology, and say that -
4. I follow Nash’s lead by nominating Science Teacher as Best Teacher Blog this year. (I wrote about issues I had with the Eddies last year, and I have issues with their open nomination process this year, but as I said on Nash’s post, in response to Michael’s declining that nomination:

[ Michael:] While I think the Eddies are dubious in many ways (and wrote a post biting the hand that fed me last year, which I linked to under my nomination banner for a few months), putting the damn thing (and Alltop badges, and anything else that communicates to first-time visitors that you’re not some tin-foil-hat-wearing…

Michael

oh, waitaminnit…some dog pawing a keyboard in human underwear) up seems to me worth it, in the balance, since anything that helps a writer’s ideas reach more readers is, um, sort of one of the things most writers want to do.

And I’m going to exit this fine post (it really is fine, Nash) so I can nominate Michael too. Deal, Doyle

I’m nominating Michael for several reasons: I look to science as the only hope we have for getting out of many fateful messes (that, yes, scientists got us into, but largely due to the greedy urgings of commerce and government and pretty much every one of us), so science teaching is important to me; Michael is an edublogger (vile term, said Polonius) who uses technology to write about science and education, not about technology (a meaning-focus, not a tools-focus); he’s whacked-out funny and roots-deep serious by turns, thank god; he is and is not an edublogger; he is and is a writer.

Just a note to say my wife and I are going to an Extensive Reading conference for a working weekend in a resort area a couple hours south of Seoul. I hear there are hot springs, which sound good this cold week.

So Happy Thanksgiving and see you on the other side. Enjoy the live puppycam while I’m gone

Free TV : Ustream

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs

Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common:

He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car with a rust-hole in the passenger side through which Michelle could see the sidewalk, but he didn’t seem to care: it got him from Point A to B. I had a ‘66 VW Bus in the late ’80s with rust-holes too, and loved it as much as the ‘68 Plymouth Valiant and ‘66 Mercedes 220S I drove in the ’90s. (I especially loved the Mercedes because I found it covered in moss under a tree, where it had sat for years, and bought it for USD $700. I washed it, pulled its engine, learned auto mechanics by rebuilding it [call it a reaction to too much book-learning and not enough manual skills], dropped it back in, and drove it cross-country from Oregon to Tennessee the summer before I entered Boot Camp and the US Army.)

He studied philosophy, religion, politics, history, literature in college. He was seeking wisdom. That’s what I did too. I took my sweet time getting my college coupon – my Bachelor’s Degree – because I wasn’t in college to get out of it, but to get as much out of it as I could. So I took 16 years between my freshman year and my graduation date, studying whatever looked interesting in each semester’s catalogue, and dropping out altogether when I needed a break, or wanted to study more deeply than college permitted. The best drop-out year came after a philosophy class in which we read only a few chapters of Nietzsche. I dropped out to read all 16 or so of his complete works, plus a few biographies and scholarly studies. That took about a year. Then I went back to college for more. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the same way, describing himself as a “college drop-in.” Obama read the Bible, read Nietzsche, and more, as a young adult. So did I.

Obama smoked, read, and wrote. So did I. I hope his writings were better than mine, but that’s not the point. The point is all of that reading and writing (the smoking was a fix to stay seated, awake, and focused) were self-compelled manifestations of a desire to make sense of life, history, and the world. Others were frying their brain cells in frat-house keg parties and sailing through classes they hoped would make them rich. I know that sounds self-righteous, but there it is. At 46 years old, I am thankful for all of that seeking. It has paid off in a daily happiness I never would have had otherwise. And when I compare myself to the rich parents of my students, who seem to have chosen those get-rich college classes and succeeded in reaching their goals – but at the expense of having a reading, writing, and culture life at all – I become even more thankful. They have more money than me, but they also seem poorer. I wouldn’t trade places.

Finally – the wrong word, since I suspect I’ll be fascinated by this man for the rest of my life, and will never delete the Google News “Obama” feed in my RSS Reader until Life deletes me – Obama says, in the interview below, that his life-long quest for values he felt right to live by (call it his “quest for God,” if you will) did not reach solid ground until he reached his fortieth year. Same here, roughly, though my years teaching Asian history in Shanghai threw some Buddha and Tao headily into my own mix, and very influentially, when I was 42 or so.

But the point is this: We talk, in our edu-lingo, about the importance of constructing meaning from our studies, not just swallowing and regurgitating received information.  What I love about the interview below is the same thing I (humbly) love about my own path: It shows an understanding of questions about God, the Sacred, and the Good and Right that are eminently constructed. This interview is an example of critical thinking about traditional religion at its best. And while I don’t share Obama’s views about many things below, I do admire that he seems to have gone through the hard work of reflecting his way to those views, instead of just believing the things he was taught by parents, preachers, and all teachers of old dogmas in his life.

Put another way, the interview below is an example of that other (rightfully) sacred cow of modern education, project-based learning – with a vengeance. Because the project was a life-long one, and so authentic it had nothing to do with assignments and grades – nothing to do with school at all. It had everything to do with authentic learning for its own sake, learning for the highest purpose of all: a life of wisdom. And if that sounds high-flown to you, it does to me too, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The guy just made history, after all, by becoming the first mixed-race president of the still very racist United States. If that doesn’t suggest a wisdom, I don’t know what does.

Before I tell you to “enjoy,” note the format of the below: the hollow bullets are snippets from the interview; the square indented bullets are my occasional annotations.

Now: “Enjoy.” We’ve got a life-long learner as our next president. Happy days are here again.

• Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani – Steven Waldman – Annotated

  Full transcript of a 2004 interview Obama gave to a religion columnist about his religious beliefs.

• tags: obama, religion, christianity, politics, elections08

  • part of my project in life was probably to spend the first 40 years of my life figuring out what I did believe – I’m 42 now – and it’s not that I had it all completely worked out, but I’m spending a lot of time now trying to apply what I believe and trying to live up to those values.
  • My grandparents who were from small towns in Kansas. My grandmother was Methodist. My grandfather was Baptist. This was at a time when I think the Methodists felt slightly superior to the Baptists. And by the time I was born, they were, I think, my grandparents had joined a Universalist church.
  • • Universal/Unitarian is my favorite denomination. – post by cburell

    [Read the rest below the fold....] Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Farren of Education for Well-Being, one of my favorite sites, writes about the fatal assumption of economic theory, and some new economics textbooks that may mark a paradigm-shift by questioning those assumptions from a green economics standpoint. Well worth a read, for both economics and environmental science teachers.

And Dr. Jim Horn, who writes at Schools Matter, a blog I’ve consistently enjoyed since subscribing a couple of months ago, writes a good analysis of the usual suspects who will be lining up outside Obama’s door to push more of the same educational policies from the Bush years here.  Jim describes the focus of Schools Matter in his tagline:

This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of “metastasizing testing” aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build.

I hope to interview Jim about his take on charter v. public schools soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if anybody is, or knows of, a strong proponent of charter schools to give a counter-argument, feel free to leave a name in comments or on my contact page.

How’s this for proof that student blogging can lead places?

Pretty cool proof that if a kid can blog about more than his favorite video game or her cat, Fluffy, the sky’s the limit. Here’s some link-love for Stas’ blog. Maybe I’ll subscribe.

He wins in a Democrat landslide. Hopes are high for a progressive agenda unseen since the New Deal, and he delivers, in the first days of his presidency, an avalanche of legislation meant to fulfill those hopes.

But he also inherits a military conflict that his advisers are counseling him to escalate – with a “surge,” we might say – and the president follows that advice. Things go downhill from there.

“He,” of course, is President Lyndon Baines Johnson – LBJ. But the parallels with President Obama are obvious. Just substitute “Afghanistan and Iraq” for “Viet Nam.”

LBJ on PBS (click image for larger view)

What an amazing time to be a US History teacher – especially with resources like the “American Experience: The Presidents” documentary series from America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) available, free and online (and many available for free download, with close captions ideal for ESL students – get ‘em while they’re hot!).

I just watched the LBJ episode and can’t wait to watch more. Coupling Obama’s presidency with LBJ’s in a compare/contrast discussion would surely enliven any US History classroom this year.

Whether you’re a teacher, student, or life-long learner, you can’t go wrong with this adventure in education. It beats the pants off of textbooks.

(And teachers, be sure to notice the teaching resources and podcasts also available for free on the site.)

‘Nuff said.  I hope it puts the emotion in history for you as it did for me. It’s tragic how emotionless schools can make such an intense subject.

Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.
–Al Gore, “The Climate for Change.” NYTimes, 2008/11/08 [emphasis added]

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations’ prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.

In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?

Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra’s warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.
–Source

Your political persuasion aside, I hope we can all agree that the level of engagement and enthusiasm for democratic engagement – for citizenship - seen in the US presidential elections was an inspiration.

It would be sad to watch that high tide recede, now that the elections are over, as if citizenship in a democracy consisted of nothing more than voting once every few years.

That’s why I’m passing along this request from Ståle Brokvam at International School of Manila to encourage both teachers and students to consider going to the 350.org website to call on President-Elect Obama to attend the UN Climate Meetings in Poland this December.

This 30-second activity, done now, might be a memorable experience for students, if you think about it. Sending a personal appeal to such an historic president might leave a deep impression on them (imagine being able to send JFK or Ronald Reagan an online letter), and one that’s good for the future of democracy in the world. Why? Because this is an act not of adulation and celebrity-esque buzz, but is instead one of treating elected officials – even the president-elect – as the public servants we expect them to be. And letting them know the public will by communicating it in writing.

Put another way, teaching kids to feel excited about an historical politician is one thing; teaching them to feel empowered to communicate their will to that person is another. The first is more about pride, which is fine; but the second, finer still, is about citizenship.

An added bonus: since the president of the US affects the world with his decisions, this site is open to the world. There’s even a globe upon which you and your students can pin their identities.

And the best bonus of all: This would not be an act of irrelevant schooliness. Unless you doubt the overwhelming consensus of scientists worldwide (see the article linked above), climate change does require rapid and decisive leadership on the part of President-elect Obama. So this beats filling out a worksheet.

Body Language: Blue-Eyes in Front, Brown-Eyes in Back

Preface: What I Learned from the Comments on My “Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist” Post

I was surprised that my story of anti-black racism in the American South drew strong reactions in the comment thread from readers in New Zealand, Australia, England, and regions of the American Mid-west (where there were no African-Americans, but there were Native Americans).

I start with this point to urge Americans and non-Americans to at the very least watch the film linked below. It’s one of the most remarkable moments in education I’ve ever seen. And it should resonate on a global, and not merely American, scale.

A Day for History

It’s November 4, 2008, an Election Day in the US that, barring a miracle or a crime, will live as long as human history does.

It makes me regret that I’m not teaching US History this year, and able to share this hopeful teachable moment the way I shared the hopeless US invasion of Iraq when teaching World History in 2003.¹  So consider this little post a fantasy of what I would somehow squeeze into my syllabus this week – which I also fantasize someone reading this post might do in the real world.

It has to do with an online documentary goodie that I’ll deliver at the end of this post, but first, a little background from a great book:

“Emotional Objectivity”: A Paradox

Toward the end of his must-read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen writes:

When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance [to " 'learning' isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data"] raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know. Still less do they learn what caused the major develpments in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.

Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office,² sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowedge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center because it affected us emotionally. . . . As textbook critic Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving emotion” (Loewen, 342-3). [Emphases added.]

Linger on the paradox in that last line. In essence, it argues that without emotion, historical objectivity is a fallacy, and this goes against the popular conception of objectivity as a dispassionate stance – “Present all sides and let students come to their own conclusions.” While some history teachers I have known and worked with understood that “all sides” (yes, a problematic concept) can be presented with the emotions attaching to those respective sides, but without crossing the line into indoctrination, more have mistaken this tightrope-walk for a breach of the objective ideal of the profession.

Loewen and Haralson, though, claim that without experiencing the emotions of history, students find it irrelevant and boring, and really don’t learn it more deeply than is necessary to pass the class. Garbage in and out.

The Connotative Maelstrom of a “President Barack Hussein Obama”

Without getting too deep about all of this – I swore I’d keep this post short – just look at all of the strands of major themes in U.S. history woven into that title: President Barack Hussein Obama. Race and racism. The legacy of slavery. The challenge of Islam and post-9/11 terrorist fears. Intermarriage and single parenting. Black liberation theology. FDR and the Great Depression.  JFK in an African-American Camelot. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jim Crow. Now factor in the race against McCain, a Vietnam Cold Warrior.  On and on go the tropes attached to this man, and back and back into US history go all the attendant hopes and fears. It reminds me of a long-ago post in which David Warlick plays with the idea of teaching history backwards, from the present to the past. All of these issues could begin with explorations of the Obama presidency, and trace the causes of its controversy that make it so historical.

This is more than a “teachable moment;” it’s a full-blown teachable year.

But I’ll stop there, confess again my envy of all US history teachers worldwide, and move on to deliver a plug to a documentary that PBS Frontline makes available to us all, online, for free. It’s called:

A Class Divided

If you take no other recommendation from me ever in your life, take this one. I had read about this famous lesson before, and about the documentary film, but had never watched it myself. So I just took a break during this post to watch it with my wife, and it jolted me in ways text couldn’t.

This third-grade teacher put the emotion in history, and judging by the film, taught her third-graders a lesson that changed them not “until garbage out,” but for life.

From the PBS FRONTLINE site:

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE’s history. It is about [Jane Elliott,] an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives. . . .

[O]n the night of the day that Martin Luther King was murdered, [Jane's] memories and experiences had coalesced into an idea of how she might give her third-graders a sense of what prejudice and discrimination really meant.

Jane took a deep breath and plunged in. “I don’t think we really know what it would be like to be a black child, do you?” she asked her class. “I mean it would be hard to know, really, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves, wouldn’t it?” Without real interest, the class agreed. “Well, would you like to find out?”

The children’s puzzlement was plain on their faces until she spelled out what she meant. “Suppose we divided the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people,” she said. “Suppose that for the rest of today the blue-eyed people became the inferior group. Then, on Monday, we could reverse it so that the brown-eyed children were inferior. Wouldn’t that give us a better understanding of what discrimination means?”

So I’ve said enough. If you do watch it, I’d love to read any thoughts in comments. The social engineering aspect of the lesson is particularly gnarly. After seeing its results, though, and hearing the views of the townspeople about it, is this something you think should be used in classrooms around the world? Have you any stories of such a thing, or lessons similar to it?

Whatever the case, here’s to Jane Elliott, a new hero in my teaching pantheon.

1. And any Surge Enthusiasts out there, please note Petraeus and other generals are far from sharing the blithe forecasts of Bush, McCain, and others in Washington. Several bombings this week in Iraq show how fragile that peace is. [↩]
2. For more on this angle, see yesterday’s post on the correlation of successful fear-mongering campaigns to voters’ educational levels [↩]

Campaign news, Supreme Court analysis, evolution and intelligent design textbook battles and history, the future of books and reading, “freedom of e-speech,” and more in today’s mix.

• My wife made me canvas for Obama; here’s what I learned | csmonitor.com

  By a Southern banker conservative. Hopeful, wry, beautiful.

  tags: obama, elections08, history, usa

• Declarations – WSJ.com

  Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan writes a fine endorsement of Obama.

  tags: obama, elections08

  • He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

    Ken Fallin

    A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd “I have no comment,” or “We shouldn’t judge.” Instead he said, “My mother had me when she was 18,” which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn’t have to.

    There is something else. On Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama won the Alabama primary with 56% to Hillary Clinton’s 42%. That evening, a friend watched the victory speech on TV in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, saw on the screen “Obama Wins” and “Alabama.” She said, “Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school.” She said, “That’s where they used the hoses.” Suddenly my friend saw it new. Birmingham, 1963, and the water hoses used against the civil rights demonstrators. And now look, the black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

    This means nothing? This means a great deal.

• Why Obama-McCain race deserves ‘historic’ label

  tags: politics, usa, history, elections08, obama, mccain

  • Take the strong link between age and views on gay rights or abortion. Young people take both for granted. “For every 100 people over age 70 who die and are replaced by 100 people between 18 and 24, you get more liberal social attitudes,” Fiorina said.

  • Not only McCain but much of the conservative intellectual elite warn of an impending turn to European-style socialism at home and appeasement abroad, especially if Democrats seize a monopoly in Washington.

    Historians call the fears exaggerated, a reflection of the country’s 30-year rightward shift. On many issues, Obama is to the right of Nixon, the Republican who proposed a guaranteed income for all Americans, supported affirmative action, imposed wage and price controls, and established much of today’s environmental regulation.

    “A conservative in 1968 was far more liberal than a liberal is in 2008,” said Schulman.

  • An Obama victory offers two potential paths: a major political realignment, following Roosevelt in 1932 and Reagan in 1980. This would require that he rack up successes in his first two years, a honeymoon when presidential power is at its peak.

    If he does, and realignment is under way, he could avoid the catastrophic losses that Clinton suffered after his 1993 health care plan crashed under a Democratic Congress, replaced in 1994 by a Republican one.

    Another model is 1964, with a big Democratic win followed by a collapse four years later, or 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter ran a flawless campaign but proved a weak leader unable to control his party or rally the public.

    “You could have a scenario where Obama is under a lot of pressure from his left and yet can’t do big economic things because of the difficult situation we’re in, where he can’t disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as the base would like,” Fiorina said. Obama could then come under attack from his left, face congressional losses in 2010 and by 2012 a challenge from his own party, perhaps Hillary Rodham Clinton.

• Bob Cesca: The Mandatory Rejection of Sarah Palin

I so hope this election serves as a death-knell referendum on the divisive Roveian electioneering of the past 8 years. Here’s to a reformed conservatism in the future that plays to ideas instead of fears.

• tags: palin, conservative, usa, elections08, racism

  • More than Palin herself, I’m looking forward to the end of an era in which the aforementioned gomers — these relatively small pockets of bigots and witch hunters — have enjoyed undeserved attention and disproportionate sway over American politics and policy.

    The truth is that politicians like Sarah Palin are merely manipulating, exploiting and inciting these people. In other words, it’s the ignorance, stupid. And next Tuesday, we have a chance to seriously marginalize this darker, uglier side of America.

    It’d be crazy, though, to suggest that Tuesday will be the last day. To be sure, if Senator Obama wins, we’ll be hearing from these knee-jerk wackaloons quite a bit. Hell, Sarah Palin might try to run for president in four years. Nevertheless, we have a chance to tell the Sarah Palin’s of the world that there’s no room in American politics for fire-eaters who stoke archaic prejudices and fears rather than ameliorating them. We have a chance to tell them that not only doesn’t it work anymore, but that it actually exacerbates electoral failure.

• Excitement and Anxiety Swirl as Chicago Prepares to Host Obama Event – NYTimes.com

  Pray for safety here.

  tags: obama, elections08, politics, history, usa

• The Canadian Press: Quebec comedy duo talks porn and politics with oblivious Sarah Palin

  Unbelievable. Ethics are sticky, but so is the story.

  tags: satire, hoax, palin, humor, politics

• 3 evolution critics on advisory panel that will review standards for science courses in Texas schools | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Texas Regional News

  Science takes another hit in Texas. Troubling.

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