Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What’s the Conservative Sleeper Issue of 2016?—Troy Senik
I may have mentioned this before here on the site — I was recently reminded that I’ve been hanging around these parts for nearly three and a half years, matching herpes for both persistence and intrusiveness —but I’ve never forgotten a piece of trivia Ed Gillespie (then Counselor to President Bush) shared with a group of us speechwriters during the 2008 campaign: the single biggest fundraising issue for the RNC during that cycle — the one that could inevitably galvanize conservative checkbooks — was the Law of the Sea Treaty.
Despite the fact that it was virtually unknown to the press and the wider GOP establishment, the underlying issue of surrendering a chunk of national sovereignty lit a fire under the base. It’s forgotten now, but Mike Huckabee’s emphasis on the issue during the pre-primary period was one of the factors that shifted his campaign into high-gear. There was a limit, of course, to how far Huckabee could ride that one issue, but let us not forget that the feelings stirred up during that campaign would ultimately block the treaty’s adoption four years later.
During the recent Ricochet meetup in Charlotte, as talk turned to the possibility of Jeb Bush running for president in 2016, I floated a theory — essentially off the top of my head — that one of Bush’s difficulties might be that opposition to Common Core (which he supports) could play precisely the same role in 2016. Looking at the huge debate that’s erupted in the press this week after Louis C.K. went on an anti-CC tirade on Twitter, I’m only more convinced.
This is precisely the kind of issue that sneaks up on the political class; one that irks everyday Americans down in their bones, but that seems so obviously beneficent to managerial types as to not even merit serious debate (recall Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — usually one of the few sober figures in the Obama Administration — dismissing Common Core criticisms as the clucking of “white suburban moms”).
What do you think? Is Common Core likely to be a sleeper issue in 2016? What other relatively minor issues could you see taking an outsized role in the fight for the GOP nomination.
Published in General
Here are three great pieces that you might want to read:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/06/if-anything-common-core-teaches-kids-to-hate-the-constitution/
http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/14/big-business-targets-common-cores-band-of-mothers/
http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/31/the-film-common-core-educrats-dont-want-you-to-see/
It is coercion. The drinking age and federal highway funds analogy comes to mind here. Federal dollars are already deeply intertwined in state education budgets. If they don’t play the game, they don’t get the dollars – and they all want dollars.
Troy,
I think you have something here. At the grassroots level people are nauseated by Common Core. Hey, the same people who are screwing up your child’s education are now going to screw up everyone’s health care in the country.
It could be a real theme.
Regards,
Jim
I saw a pro-Common Core commercial during FNS this morning. My question is who is funding these pro-Common Core commercials? The teacher unions? It seems to me that the rank and file members of the union are opposed to it because of the testing requirements. Is it the progressives like Soros? Obama’s organizing for America? Bloomberg?
I just don’t see the big lobby for Common Core.
Bill Gates.
I don’t know about the commercials, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a major player. Common Core is a “moderate” cause — if you really liked NCLB, you’re probably pro-CC. The further-left progressives join the more conservative in opposing it. Sometimes even for similar reasons! The teachers’ unions actually don’t like Secretary of Ed Arne Duncan very much. Some more conservative groups like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute strongly support it.
That’s ESEA/NCLB. I wouldn’t quite describe Race to the Top as coercion, it was more of a bribe. It was a competition in which not every state that tried even got the money, and some states felt quite free to say “no, thanks” — notably Texas — and are doing fine.
Yes, get rid of Common Core and then . . . what? Replace it with another huge federal program with a different cutesy name and a new set of arbitrary requirements?
I’m with this 100 percent. The GOP must protect real free enterprise, not the parody it has become. If, as a candidate, you find yourself on the attack, ask the attackers: “which of your handouts are you trying to protect?”
There’s a case for restoring local control of education, but it must be made clearly and carefully. Also, recent polling hints that anti-Common Core messages may not be particularly effective. “Standards” sound awfully good to most voters, while the Common Core objections I’ve heard don’t always ring true (and I have a 3rd-grader in a CC state).
Making Common Core an issue in the primaries is a hard sell. The incentive to adopt CC to receive Race To The Top federal funding puts the blame on states. Even if it’s unpopular, CC still will seem like another well-intentioned, but poorly conceived education plan like No Child Left Behind. I dislike Common Core, but I this a state-level debate, not a primary one. At this rate, I think CC will die on the vine.
Problem is your claims aren’t true. Public sector employees aren’t overpaid and the public employee unions aren’t the bogeyman you’d like them to be, which is why this hasn’t gone anywhere.
Education begins in the home and what my children and I do together, and the fact is that the homework my son and daughter are bringing home as a result of Common Core makes the task more difficult, because I sometimes cannot understand it. It becomes frustrating. The entire thing will die a slow death. South Carolina just repealed it. Once again look to the South for some sort of reclamation of what we once were.
Words:
Yet another word trick The Left benefits from, pointed out by John Derbyshire in one of his “Radio Derb” podcasts: what are called public-sector, or public-employee “unions” are more accurately called “lobbies”. They lobby, not employers, but the government, for favors and money.
Not sure if it’ll do us any good to try and change the language….
Don’t forget his wife, who his second biggest issue and the primary reason he has not run for any political office since leaving the Governs Office.
I have exactly zero information about his wife. She is a non-entity in my mind.