DEMOCRAT NIGHTMARE: SPECIAL INTEREST WARS

As the accompanying article attests: the Democrat party has the makings of a civil war on it's hands. It seems that if the choice is to live by promoting interest and identity groups, the outcome may well be to die by the same.

The political left has rarely been guided by principle. Instead, self-promotion is the overarching premise for it's existence. Thus it has consistently made open appeals to interest and identity groups in an ongoing 'quid pro quo' arrangement that amounts to a 'you vote for me, I pay you back' scenario. The left is not about the greater good, it is about self-interest, power and money.

The example in the story below is instructive. There appears to be, not just in Georgia but nationally, an awakening among black Americans (Democrat identity group) that our existing system of public education is not only failing children in general but black kids in particular. The worst of the worst schools tend to be located within inner city poor neighborhoods where many if not most underprivileged black children reside.

Just about every effort in recent years to improve the lot of those kids has been opposed by teachers unions (Democrat interest group). So we see an ongoing opposition by those unions to Charter Schools, AmeriCorps teaching programs, full scholarship federal grants for the inner city students and efforts to clean up the failed public school system like that in Washington DC.

Thus we have Democrat "served" interest/identity groups in fully opposing positions. Obviously, something has to give.

In this case, black Americans are waking up to the fact that they have been consistently manipulated and taken for granted by the left. After all, the longer the left can keep people ignorant of their circumstances, the longer they can continue to harvest their votes.

In other words, if the left can keep the poor locked into a generational cycle of poverty using welfare to keep them trapped in the permanent underclass, the better it is for the left politically. At the end of the day, the left promotes welfare not to lift people out of a downward spiral but to keep them there so that they can control them more readily.

A lousy education plays directly into that scheme. The less educated people are, the less likely it is that they will come to understand the trap they have been put into and are being kept in from generation to generation. Once in that cycle, people become dependent and once they are dependent they are far more easily manipulated.

But clearly there are some who have decided to fight against this unethical political intent. The rise of the Charter School movement across America is a very serious threat to the strangle hold that teachers unions currently have on public education.

Parents are increasingly fed up with the cesspool in which their children are drowning that is the public education system. They are choosing Charter Schools and a host of other options in droves in what is a growing movement to abandon the public schools.

The teachers unions have, in large part but not entirely, destroyed public education. Their Democrat puppets have fully cooperated. Now, they find their inner city constituents abandoning the ship of self-interest.

The end just may be in sight.


School Choice Is the New Civil Rights Struggle
A word of support from the president could transform local politics on the issue.
By BRENDAN MINITER

Getting arrested doesn't normally bolster a politician's credibility. But when South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford told me recently that he saw the inside of a jail cell 73 times, he did so to make a point. As a youth, Mr. Ford cut his political teeth in tumultuous 1960s civil-rights protests.
AP
Today this black Democrat says the new civil-rights struggle is about the quality of instruction in public schools, and that to receive a decent education African-Americans need school choice. He wants the president's help. "We need choice like Obama has. He can send his kids to any school he wants."
Mr. Ford was once like many Democrats on education -- a reliable vote against reforms that would upend the system. But over the past three and a half years he's studied how school choice works and he's now advocating tax credits and scholarships that parents can spend on public or private schools.
He's not alone. Three other prominent black Democrats in South Carolina have publicly challenged party orthodoxy. In 2006 State Rep. Harold Mitchell Jr. crossed party lines to endorse Republican Karen Floyd for state education superintendent. "We have to try something different," he told me at the time. That same year, Curtis Brantley defeated a state representative in a primary fought over education reform. And last year, Ennis Bryant ran (unsuccessfully) against an anti-school-choice state representative in a primary.
These men are the most visible part of a movement joining black Democrats and political conservatives in a common cause. In recent years, school-choice candidates (black and white) have taken the seats of more than half a dozen antichoice legislators, and there have been two mass rallies for school choice at the state capitol that included black leaders.
Charter and private schools geared toward impoverished black children also are cropping up, and no wonder. There are about 700,000 students in public schools in South Carolina, more than a third of whom -- 247,000 -- are in schools considered to be failing based on test scores. Nearly 60% of the kids in these failing schools -- about 146,000 -- are African-American. Blacks make up about 39% of public-school students.
In March, a Pulse Opinion Research poll of 1,000 black voters in the state reported that 53% agreed that school choice would improve public education (28% disagreed). Support for school-choice legislation increased to 61% when Mr. Ford's name was attached to it.
Two years ago, legislation that would have created education tax credits failed in the House by a handful of votes and could pass today with the support of just a few more members. Meanwhile, Mr. Ford estimates that he is now just two votes shy in the state Senate of passing legislation that would create scholarships for poor children, and education tax credits for all parents, that would be equal to half of what the state spends per-student in each district. When Mr. Ford announced his bill in March, he held a press conference in the capitol that forced work on the House floor to come to a standstill as lawmakers made their way out to hear him thunder, "I don't give a damn about the money. I'm doing this for the kids."
The danger for Democrats still opposed to school choice is that Mr. Ford represents widespread frustration among black voters who see Mr. Obama in the White House and now expect real change to occur in their communities. Black voters could come to support conservative education policies (if not GOP candidates).
Typically, school-choice fights involve Republicans and a handful of Democrats pushing vouchers for a limited number of poor kids in inner cities. That's fine as far as it goes. But, as is evident in Washington, D.C., it doesn't go far. With just a few thousand families receiving vouchers, congressional Democrats are confident that they can kill the school-choice program in D.C. without provoking a voter backlash.
In South Carolina, however, the tax credits on the table would go to middle-class and poor parents alike and would align the interests of the vast majority of voters with those of poor families. If such tax credits take root, they will create a coalition between black Democrats and Republicans and be nearly impossible to trim back, let alone repeal.
That coalition is already starting to form. Mr. Ford is finding a ready ally in Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who has spent the past six years pushing for school choice. The governor has already enacted charter-school legislation, created choice at the prekindergarten level, and has twice pushed for tax credits. School choice is a top goal of his in his final two years in office.
South Carolina doesn't have powerful education unions that can derail reforms, so Democrats are scrambling for alternatives. Jim Rex, the state school superintendent, is pushing to give parents more choices within the public system -- such as magnet schools and single-gender programs. He has also revamped the state's standardized tests. But Democrats are late to the game and parents are growing impatient for progress.
"[Mr.] Obama knows the right thing to do," Mr. Ford told me, noting that just a few words from the president praising education tax credits would likely swing the state senators he needs to pass his legislation. But will the president do it?

Mr. Miniter is an assistant features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc

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