Every political faction wants to interpret the result of the election through their own lens. And that’s to be expected.
There needs to be some grounding in reality, however. But not from the wing-nuts at the Fordham House of Crack. Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli describe their hallucinations in a post on their Flypaper blog. There is just too much good stuff there. I could write for days.
Think of it as a post-election gift that you ed bloggers can share. Let me just take one:
Support from the teacher unions was not essential to Obama’s sweeping victory and frees him—if he’s so inclined—to advance policies and programs that they don’t love, perhaps starting with charter schools (one of the few issues enjoying bipartisan support during this election).
The four million members of the teacher unions were not essential to Obama’s victory? These two don’t have a clue.
Tell the thousands of union teachers from solid blue states like New York and Illinois that spent their weekends in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin and turned those swing states blue how they weren’t essential.
Wonkers like Finn and Petrilli still don’t get it that key to this election was what the pols call the ground game. We in Chicago know it wins elections: canvassing, identifying plusses and minuses, getting out the plusses on election day. A grass-roots movement won this election. And the NEA/AFT were in it, from the one in ten delegates at the Democratic convention, to the millions of dollars that were raised and contributed to union PACs, to the teachers in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago that has voted Republican for a 100 years, but that went for Obama on Tuesday.
Go ask the Obama people if he’s “so inclined” to ignore union teachers.
Fred Klonsky 