"The damn law is ludicrous"

That's James H. Dillard II of Fairfax, Va., describing President Bush's signature education measure, the "No Child Left Behind Act."

Dillard is not some knee-jerk Bush-hater. He's a Republican state legislator, chairman of Virginia's House Education Committee. Like every other Republican in his state's House of Delegates, Dillard voted for a resolution seeking to exempt Virginia from NCLB:

By a vote of 98 to 1, the House passed a resolution calling on Congress to exempt states like Virginia from the program's requirements. The law "represents the most sweeping intrusions into state and local control of education in the history of the United States," the resolution says, and will cost "literally millions of dollars that Virginia does not have."

That's from this Washington Post report by Jo Becker and Rosalind S. Helderman, who also quote Scott Young, an "education policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislators" as saying "there is definitely a bipartisan backlash in the states" against Bush's education law.

Further evidence of this backlash:

As a result of a Republican legislative initiative in Ohio, the state commissioned a study released this month that found the federal government had significantly underfunded No Child Left Behind.

In North Dakota, a resolution sponsored by Democrats that stated the "cost to states of implementing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is as yet unclear" was passed by both the Republican-controlled House and Senate. And the Republican legislature in Utah is considering legislation to forgo the federal money and opt out of the program entirely.

President Bush has signaled that he expects NCLB to be a winning issue in his campaign for re-election. In his recent State of the Union address -- which seemed to be a preview of his stump speech -- he touted the law, one of his main domestic policy achievements, as a means of "opening the door of opportunity to all of America's children."

Yet a growing number of state legislators -- including many from his own party -- vehemently disagree. Look again at that vote from Virginia's House of Delegates: 98 to 1.

That suggests not only that this is a losing issue for the incumbent's re-election campaign, but that it's potentially a winning issue for the challenger.

Comments

[drieux just drieux]

Thanks for the URL.

The only bright light seems to be the ungainly hope that slowly
americans will resolve which part of federalism really needs to
be used for what classes of problems.

cf:
Like Federalism?

[zenjohn]

This is all part of Operation Drown It In the Bathtub. NCLB was _designed_ to fail, so that the GOP can say "see, big government education programs just don't work." Call me a paranoid cynic, but nothing seems impossible with this crowd anymore.

[Evan]

Potentially a winning issue for a challenger, yes. Though it's a little harder if the challenger voted for it.

(This is just one area where I think the conventional wisdom is seriously underestimating electability problems faced by certain democratic candidates, while overestimating those of one particular one.)

[Nell Lancaster]

not only that this is a losing issue for the incumbent's re-election campaign, but that it's potentially a winning issue for the challenger.

Unless the challenger voted for it, as John Kerry did.
And for the war resolution, and for the tax cuts, and the Patriot Act....

The Democratic nominee is going to have to have a positive vision and solutions for the problems that Bush has created. If he's been part of creating those problems, it's going to be that much harder to convince voters he has the right answers.

[Kevin Carson]

zenjohn,

The "No Child's Behind Left Unviolated" Act is pretty consistent with neoconservative sensibilities, though. They aren't called "big government conservatives" for nothing. For all the federalist rhetoric they use, all they really mean by "states' rights" is a greater degree of administrative autonomy in administering federal funds. And the Bill Bennetts and Jack Kemps have no problem whatsoever with social engineering by the federal government, so long as the values being imposed are "conservative."

So I don't think federal involvement in education through NCLB, or vouchers, or federalizing welfare policy with faith-based initiatives, is an act of duplicity on their part at all. The claim to respect local prerogatives is where they're lying.

The people most likely to object to NCLB are those gravitating toward the Lew Rockwell/Bob Barr/Ron Paul axis of paleocons and libertarians within the GOP. Many of them voted for Bush because they believed the "aw, shucks" Red State faux populism, and thought he'd be good on guns and taxes. Instead, they got John Ashcroft's police state, a $500 billion deficit, and a much less humble foreign policy. With luck, a lot of them will stay home in disgust this November.