Campaign 2008

Financial - political thoughts

David Gray — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:11:00 -0400

Oh why did this have to happen in the fall in an even/election year of the 8th year of a presidency. any other time the vote passes yesterday.

Thursday Congress returns to debate the financial crisis. Do you wonder if McCain wishes he had Romney now heading into the debate with Biden that night instead of Palin?

Shoutout for Early Education in Presidential Debate

Sara Mead — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:05:00 -0400

Friday's Presidential debate was supposed to focus on foreign policy, so we weren't expecting to hear much discussion of early education issues. But during a section in which moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates about how the current financial crisis will impact their proposed policy agendas, Democratic candidate Barack Obama gave a shout-out to early education as the kind of needed investment that produces long-term returns that justify increasing investments even in tight economic times:

LEHRER: Would you go for that [a freeze on domestic spending proposed by McCain]?

OBAMA: The problem with a spending freeze is you're using a hatchet where you need a scalpel. There are some programs that are very important that are under funded. I want to increase early childhood education and the notion that we should freeze that when there may be, for example, this Medicare subsidy doesn't make sense.

Interesting Op Ed on the Battle for the Senate

David Gray — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:57:00 -0400

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121936710710962237.html?mod=todays_columnists

Education in the Election: The View from Canada

Sara Mead — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:05:00 -0400

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Canadian columnist John Ibbitson offers an interesting perspective on the current U.S. presidential race. Ibbitson notes that the tenor of the campaign debate has pushed education reform out of the public view in this race, and wonders why, given the issue's importance to America's future. Ibbitson makes a pretty bold prediction:

But mark this: After this election, education will be one of the two or three issues that dominate political debate. Why? Because it's simply too huge a problem to ignore.

Ibbitson goes on to identify high dropout rates and poor showings on international assessments as key indicators that the U.S. education system is struggling. That's similar to something David Brooks wrote earlier this year when he identified the skills slowdown--the stagnation in the percentage of Americans attaining higher education credentials or even a high school diploma--as the major challenge facing the United States in the coming years. The exploding financial crisis this week has focused attention elsewhere, but it's undeniable that getting us out of the hole created by the current crisis is going to require, among other things, a new generation of American workers capable of competing with their increasingly educated peers in other countries, and more importantly of developing the next generation of transformative innovations--real innovations, not just financial chicancery--that have been behind our economic success over the past century. And that requires a renewed focus on improving the quality of educational outcomes for all our students--including those who have historically been underserved.

A lot of the conversation about these issues focuses on high school reform, college access, and strategies to increase the number of young people taking advanced coursework in math and sciences--all important goals. But these initiatives can only succeed if they build on an early education system that equips children with the foundational skills and knowledge they need before they can tackle advanced content. We know that children who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade are at risk for school dropout and a host of other problems, and that remedying our failure to help these children succeed early is much more difficult and costly than doing it right from the start. Yet only 33 percent of our 4th graders read at the proficient level. Building a strong early education foundation--starting in the preschool years and continuing through kindergarten and quality early elementary school--must be a top priority for the next administration, regardless of who wins in November.

Ibbitson isn't entirely correct that education's been AWOL from the current campaign debate. Just take a look at this discussion with top education advisers to both the McCain and Obama campaigns to see that both sides are doing some interesting thinking here. And, in a development that Early Ed Watch is particularly gratified to see, both McCain and Obama have endorsed quality early education--although they clearly have very different views on what the federal role in supporting early education access and quality should be. Unfortunately, the media hasn't focused much attention on these issues. There's also an interesting conversation going on among Democrats about the future of Democratic thinking on education issues--New America is hosting a discussion on this topic Friday; more information here.

Candidates' Faith

David Gray — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:15:00 -0400

The breadth of Christian religious backgrounds of the four candidates (Pentacostal, UCC, Catholic, Episcopalian/Baptism) is very interesting to me.

Great Gerson column on Palin's faith

David Gray — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:14:00 -0400

in Post this week

The Palins, Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown

David Gray — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:56:00 -0400

At the Republican convention, Sarah Palin introduced herself to the world in the speech of a lifetime. Her family was nearby and joining them was Levi Johnston, the father of the baby that Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is carrying. Sarah Palin is often compared to Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's surprise 1988 running mate, who the media often suggested was unqualified for the Vice-Presidency. Polls show that as many as a third of Americans believe Palin is unqualified as well. Yet the Quayle associations don't end there. In one of his most famous speeches, Quayle criticized the television character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock. Quayle's speech was criticized by the media but hailed by conservatives for pointing out that a role model like Brown having a child out of wedlock could send the wrong example to young Americans. The media is not sure what to do with Palin's daughter. Palin's daughter is pregnant with the child due around New Years. The Palins and Levi Johnston's parents have both stated that their children plan to wed sometime before the baby is due. When you are a lifetime member of the NRA who hunts grizzly bears, a shotgun wedding is not just a metaphor. You think your life is busy? This fall, Sarah Palin will be running for vice president, serving as Governor of the State of Alaska, caring for several children, including a four month old, sending a child off to fight in Iraq........and planning her daughter's wedding. Much as Quayle criticized Brown for her pregnancy, many conservatives and liberals are now worried about teen pregnancy in America, and for good reason. After a decade of declining teen birth rates, in 2005-2007, teen pregnancy numbers began to flatten out and have begun to show signs of increasing. This is worrying social scientists, some of whom blame the increase in out-of-wedlock births on celebrity pregnancies, including 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney Spears' sister. Now there is another prominent 17-year-old who is with child. Only this time, conservatives are running to her defense. While Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston certainly deserve to work through this with some privacy, Levi's attendance with the Palin family at the convention is thrusting this issue into the public eye. Will a conversation about roll models, teen pregnancy rates and family formation follow? We'll see. What would Dan Quayle say about all this?

Leave No Worker Behind

David Gray — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 15:02:00 -0400

In his campaign acceptance speech last week, John McCain focused on worker retraining in a way Republican candidates rarely do. McCain has understood throughout this campaign that how he responds to the plight of workers harmed by the global economy will be critical to his election chances. In a March 24, 2008, editorial in the Washington Post, McCain's senior policy advisor included modernizing unemployment insurance and training programs as a critical component to McCain's plan to turn around the economy. Now this important issue is urgent. Last week the Labor Department reported that unemployment has jumped from 5.7% to 6.1%, a five year high, as employers slashed jobs. If such economic trends continue, McCain will have trouble winning the battleground states and the election.
Yet worker retraining is a perfect area for McCain to demonstrate his concern for workers and his key theme of bipartisan leadership. Workforce development is an area that has been under the radar for the past few years. Efforts to reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), the federal umbrella law for job training programs, have been stymied. WIA reauthorization, unemployment insurance reform, wage insurance and trade adjustment assistance reform are ripe issues for the next president and Congress to discuss and address.Perhaps the most significant domestic policy work of the past eight years was the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law. President Bush and Ted Kennedy worked together for a bipartisan education plan. Of course NCLB is not without controversy and McCain has to be careful associating himself with work of the past eight years; his strategy is clearly to separate from it. Bipartisan leadership was clearly shown with that law. That is the model for McCain. Worker retraining is the next stage of educational training. Rather than teaching high school kids, its teaching adults who have lost a “job that won’t be coming back, skills so they can get a job they won’t lose,” as McCain would say. Yet workforce investment policy remains stuck in partisan gridlock in the Congress. McCain did well last night to outline some specifics about his philosophy for worker retraining. He discussed community colleges, which are important, though the Bush administration has also focused on them. One key line that has been underreported is his mention of filling the gap between an unemployed worker’s lost salary and that person’s new wage while that person trains for the new job. That sentence signals support for an idea supported usually by Democrats - wage insurance - insuring a worker’s income against job loss. This is a significant phrase for a GOP candidate to utter. Federal spending on worker training has fallen dramatically over the past generation to the lowest spending per capita among the major industrialized nations and McCain did not spell out how he would improve worker retraining without violating his pledge to cut government spending. Still, McCain needs to do more to address the economic anxiety workers face. Rising unemployment numbers make this issue all the more urgent. Workforce policy is not only outdated, but stuck in the kind of bipartisan gridlock McCain wants to be elected to fix. This is an untapped area that he should move quickly to fill.

Wage Insurance

David Gray — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:26:00 -0400

One key line that has been underreported from McCain's convention speech is his mention of filling the gap between an unemployed worker’s lost salary and that person’s new wage while that person trains for the new job. That sentence signals support for an idea supported usually by Democrats of wage insurance - insuring a worker’s income against job loss. This is a significant phrase for a GOP candidate to utter.

Return of the Rough Riders

David Gray — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:56:00 -0400

John McCain likes to talk about Teddy Roosevelt as one of his heroes. So he picked a true Western hunter tough.....person as his runningmate.