Rhee’s Framing of the Debate on Education

On the evening of February 7, Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of DC public schools and the public face of the opaquely funded StudentsFirst, addressed an audience of some four thousand people at the Paramount theater in Oakland. This lecture was one of a number of lectures purchased as a series, and did not imply any particular interest in Rhee or in education by the older and relatively affluent crowd attending, the sort of crowd one finds at similar series, whether theater, ballet, or classical music.

As I have never heard Rhee speak before, I cannot say that she tailored her talk to this particular audience, but given her consummate skills as a public speaker, I would be very surprised if she had not.

The lecture was divided in three parts. First, Rhee introduced herself and described her leadership of the DC public schools; next, she outlined her fundamental principles about education; finally, she answered questions from the audience.

In the first part, Rhee established her persona: a mix of unprepossessing but feisty “Korean lady,” finding herself unaccountably charged with the management of DC public schools and concerned only for the good of the children. Her narrative of her three years as DC chancellor, a position for which she had no qualifications or experience, framed her dictatorial and disruptive tenure as the story of a plain speaking firebrand who sliced through every piece of red tape and obstruction to transform institutional corruption into a working school system. Rich in anecdote and short on facts, the main point of the story was to set up Rhee as a concerned citizen who was out of patience with a dysfunctional system and whose arbitrary and devastating actions (performed under the aegis of Mayoral control) were not a violation of the democratic rights of parents and teachers and children, but the necessary and heroic actions of a woman more concerned with the good of the children than with the interest of other “adults” involved in the educational system. Someone listening closely might have wondered why schools were failing quite so badly since, in fact, they had been following the kill and drill NCLB model [No Child Left Behind] for close to a generation. Listeners might have also wondered about her assertions as to how much money is being lavished on these failing schools. But facts are little things, and Rhee’s aim to tell a “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” story largely succeeded. In this story, her lack of expertise and experience prove that she is not part of the education insiders responsible for the education crisis. (Predictably, Rhee thundered about the education crisis, forgetting to mention that the poor standing of the U.S. in the world reflects only the plight of our poorer students, and that comparing the right demographic groups yields results that are much different and far more complimentary to U.S. public education.)

Having established herself as regular folk with a passion for education, representing her lack of experience as the necessary foundation for a radical critique of the current state of education, Rhee went on to describe the three factors in the shaping of education: the importance of teachers, global competition, and bipartisanship.

The importance of teaching: First, Rhee acknowledged the importance of teachers. She told a very moving story of a great teacher in action, implicitly appealing to the memory of every great teacher that everyone has had at one time or another.

One would have had to be listening very closely and to have known something about the effect of NCLB on schools and the teaching profession to understand that something was wrong with the picture. How does one reconcile an admiration for teachers with her open contempt for the few benefits teachers enjoy: some measure of autonomy in their teaching practice, due process and stability in their profession, the prospect of retirement after a life-time of dedicated and selfless work? How does one reconcile her belief in the importance of teaching with her curt dismissal of the importance of professional training for teachers? How does one reconcile her appreciation of teachers with her promotion of ineffective and divisive merit pay, or her abject disregard for class size? How does one reconcile her belief in the importance of teaching with her capricious and destructive actions in DC?

In fact there is no way to reconcile these things. At bottom, her belief in the importance of teachers achieves two things: one, it makes the audience trust her because who could possibly believe in the effectiveness of an educational system that did not depend on the quality of teaching; two, to stress the importance of teaching is to minimize the much greater effect of poverty on educational outcomes. A great teacher, Rhee tells us again and again, can make all the difference. So if students are failing it cannot be that they are hungry or ill or stressed by homelessness or their parents’ despair. No, if students are failing, it is because a teacher has failed to teach them.

A constant refrain — explicit or implicit — in all of Rhee’s talk of education, turns on the notion that the interests of children and that of adults are diametrically opposed, and that educational policy is needed to reconcile them. According to this view, teachers care about benefits, retirement, and protection against their own incompetence; therefore they do not care about children. As a corollary, teachers’ unions exist specifically to protect teachers’ interests and therefore, necessarily, to undermine the education of children. This is why high stakes testing and merit pay are needed: a stick and a carrot for teachers who would otherwise neglect or underserve their charges. The notion that a teacher’s working environment is a student’s learning environment would be incomprehensible to Rhee. Or rather, it would be comprehensible only to the extent that keeping the teacher in a state of constant terror would be the most effective way of making sure that the job is done right.

Global competition: Second, Rhee remonstrated with the audience about how we coddle our children, praising mediocre performance and rendering them unfit to compete with the well drilled and properly humbled children of Singapore, Korea, Japan, etc. To support this thesis, Rhee described the trophies adorning the rooms of her two daughters, admittedly lousy soccer players. One would have to think hard to figure out how unearned soccer trophies are an analogue to the current drill and kill regime in the public schools. I would think that they were opposites. I guess the subtext was that some measure of pain is necessary to make students “competitive,” though what exactly the parents would be signing up for under this rubric was not clear. I guess the larger aim was to present education as something that was inextricably tied to competition and to providing exactly the kind of labor that corporations need. Education not as a project of enlightenment, not as a foundation for democracy, not as a second chance in a grotesquely skewed economy — but as a form of mortification that might render one employable.

Bipartisan agenda: Third, while acknowledging herself to be a die hard Democrat, Rhee asserted that her educational program transcends political boundaries and could include Democrat as well as Republican. Of course, the neo-liberal educational agenda, which would essentially place education under private control is already completely bipartisan. Obama’s “Race to the Top” follows smoothly from Bush’s NCLB; the actual goal of both programs is to justify the privatization of all “failing” schools and the transmutation of public funds into guaranteed profits. So why belabor the bipartisan issue? One answer might be the voucher story: At this point she told the story of a woman who had failed to get her child into a good school, and was petitioning for a voucher. Rhee, unable to betray the needs of the child for a more abstract good, crossed party lines and produced the voucher. Thus, under the cover of an anecdote that shows her warm humanitarian concerns, Rhee signals her implicit support for the next step in the privatization process: from charter to voucher, a step not yet taken by the democrats as a whole. I’m guessing too that rhetorically the first goal is to disavow any personal political interest (unlike those Democratic teachers unions) and second to fish for money wherever it could be found, Democratic or Republican pockets.

Here’s what I took away from the lecture that might be useful going forward:

1. Rhee is an outstanding public speaker, who manages to turn her inexperience as an educator into the virtue of being the objective outsider. Within this frame, questioning her or her motives is simply evidence of one’s entrenched devotion to the status quo.
2. Rhee is the public face of a counter-revolution in education that promises better outcomes without additional resources. She insists that we spend lots of money on education without getting results; therefore money does not matter. Except for merit pay. That’s not consistent? Oh well. However her insistence that we must work within current economic constraints makes her argument appear more realistic.
3. The core of her argument is that the interests of children and teachers (adults) are opposed. Therefore, limiting the pay of most teachers, taking away tenure or collective bargaining rights, or firing teachers when they become too expensive can only benefit children.
4. She has no notion of anything greater than the self-interested individual. Education is something that happens as a result of a system of punishments and rewards for both teachers and students. The notion that children are naturally interested in learning, that teachers care about children, and that education depends upon relationships– the relationship of student to teacher, and the relationship of teachers to one another– has no place in her narrative.
5. Her overt message is framed in such a way that it is impossible not to applaud (unless one looks under the covers): who would deny that education is important? who would deny that children need good teachers? who would deny that we live in a competitive world? Her claim that StudentsFirst has over a million followers is very likely a lie. The tallied numbers represent eyeballs rather than active, engaged members. But it’s very clear that her framing is aimed at winning over multitudes and claiming wide popular support for what is essentially a privatization scheme that is backed by a billionaire’s club.

There are a number of ways to fight Rhee

It is hard not to attempt to fight Rhee in a rational way, using actual data. She is a liar and that ought to matter. Unfortunately, this counter-revolution in public education should convince us that facts do not matter in the least bit. Or, at least, they have not mattered so far. What matters far more is the framing. So here are our choices.

• Offer facts and figures about the invention of an educational crisis. I don’t think this works because while it’s clear there is a crisis; fewer know that it is mainly the result of policies like NCLB and overall economic collapse.
• Offer facts and figures about Rhee’s backers. I don’t think this works because a lot of people think it’s good that the billionaires are donating to public ed. Rhee herself is not shy about acknowledging lunching with Warren Buffet. She uses it as proof of her importance and of the validity of her ideas.(She reported that Buffett had the solution to improving public education: Make private schools illegal and send all kids to public schools using a lottery system. That, he insists, would improve the schools pronto. I applauded this idea wildly, but she had trotted it out simply to underline the fact that it was an impossible solution.)
• Offer facts and figures about Rhee herself and her failure in DC (re-hired teachers, cheating, destruction of community schools). This would not defeat the larger framing issues.
• Re-frame the debate: insisting upon the following principles:
  • The interests of students and teachers are not opposed.
  • Education results from the relationship of student to teacher.
  • Education is not a race; it is the foundation of the common good.
  • Experience matters.
  • Education is not a scarce good

Let us be conscious of the fact that “Students first” recalls the moral imperative of “women and children first,” an honored protocol during a time of disaster. But, the promoters of this strategy fail to ask how that disaster came about. They refuse to look at the social, economic, and historical forces that have placed war first, bank bailouts first, and children last. Rather, Students First demands that we choose the interests of students over that of teachers, implying that their interests are in conflict, that a gain for one must be a loss for the other. Viewed in this light, teachers unwilling to work yet more hours, teachers who are concerned about job security, and teachers who care about working conditions are traitors to student interests. Let us be very clear about the origins of our current disaster.

We have all sat through flight safety instructions, where, counter to our protective impulses, we are urged to put on the oxygen mask before tending to our children. A moment’s thought proves the wisdom of this recommendation. We cannot help our children unless we ourselves can breathe; but Students First would have us believe that the more tenuous, the more stressed the position of the teacher, the more benefit accrues to their students. Apparently for Students First, there are never enough oxygen masks. This is the most important frame for us to use in teaching people and teachers how to think about the current situation.

The only way forward is to create a more compelling story that shifts the terms of the debate. It is not enough to claim that public education is for the 99%. In fact, that 99% has been sliced and diced in so many ways, that we are left with the contending special interests of suburban schools, urban schools, charters, vouchers… and the very mistaken notion that a good education is of necessity a scarce good.

The core of our story must be that a good education is the result of an enduring relationship of student to teacher, and that the commitment of the educational system to the teacher — to her training, evaluation, and job satisfaction — will translate into her effective commitment to the education of her students. It is because this relationship is so essential to education that education cannot be industrialized. Neither the teacher nor the student are interchangeable parts.

The absolute rejection of high-stakes testing, which devours the energy, resources, and morale of teachers; which strips the autonomy and authority of educators; and which serves no other purpose than to justify the destruction of unions and eventual privatization.

The insistence that training and experience are key to good teaching…with parallels drawn to every other profession known to man.

Joanna A. Bujes is an Oakland public school parent and supporter of public education. She has taught at U.C. Berkeley, University of Santa Clara, and SUNY Plattsburgh, and she has been a volunteer teacher and tutor in the Oakland public schools (poetry, drama, math) whenever she could find the time.

The key thing I took away from the memo is that it does not read at all like the current story the administration gives for the inadequate size of the stimulus, which is that they knew it should be larger but had to face political reality.

Instead, the memo argues that a bigger stimulus would be counterproductive in economic terms, because of the “market reaction”. That is, Summers et al were afraid of the invisible bond vigilantes.

And to the extent that there is a political judgment, it’s all in the opposite direction: if the stimulus is too big, we’ll have trouble scaling it back, but if it’s too small, we can always go back to Congress for more.

via Larry and the Invisibles – NYTimes.com.

OWS is over after Tuesday:

Friends, mediation with the drummers has been called off. It has gone on for more than 2 weeks and it has reached a dead end. The drummers formed a working group called Pulse and agreed to 2 hrs/day at times during the mediation, and more recently that changed to 4 hrs/day. It’s my feeling that we may have a fighting chance with the community board if we could indeed limit drumming and loud instrumentation to 12-2pm and 4-6pm, however that isn’t what’s happening.

This would have been pretty big, if true. Except it wasn’t. Michael Pollak — the most fair, level-headed and rational person I know on the Left — has been visiting Zuccotti frequently and attending some of the General Assembly sessions. He had this say:

Okay, I just got back from the park and 60 Wall (which is the hive of the working groups) and this was clearly a non-issue.  Nobody mentioned it and everyone is still working with timelines extending into the indefinite future.  I was a little embarassed to ask, to be honest, it was so obviously an exaggerated rumor.  But when asked, the general answer was the same: the GA/drum circle conflict has been there since the beginning, and conflict and negotiation with the neighbors and city officials has been there since the beginning.  Nothing’s changed or come to crisis.  On the contrary, things have recently gotten substantially better on both fronts precisely because the drummers are drumming substantially less now. So the conflict will continue, and hopefully continue to improve.  No one was worried.  People getting mad or feeling agreements were reneged is just considered SOP when there’s a conflict.  It always leads to another meeting.

And speaking of conflicts — or lack thereof — the Demand working group met today with the Facilitation working group, the one that sets the agenda for the nightly general assembly.  They couldn’t have been nicer or more efficient.  We asked if we could propose it and they said sure.

So rumors that this would somehow get strangled in its cradle behind the scenes seem entirely ungrounded. To judge by this meeting, I don’t see how it would such smothering would be even possible, this committee seems so transparent and rational and non-judgmental.  It looks at this point as if the whole idea was either a misunderstanding or a bluff or both.

What a difference data makes!

The idea is simple and brilliant:

1. Choose a method — occupation — that overcomes the customary weakness of other actions of the powerless such as rallies and marches: politicians, administrators, the police, simply wait them out; let the protestors have their day with marching and speeches, after which the powerful can return to business as usual. Even the term “occupy” upends that relationship.

2. Target the clearest representation (Wall Street) of the few who were the primary cause of the economic meltdown of 2008, while also the greatest beneficiaries of the government response to the crisis.

3. Make the identification clear: the most common slogan used by the group is “we are the 99%“. While their sentiments may not be shared by all of the 90+% that took the bulk of the pain and gained little benefit from the Bush-Obama bailouts and half-hearted programs, the material reality is well captured by the slogan. A long overdue challenge, in simple terms, to the Right’s effortless claim to the majority opinion or position.

Due to their resilience, and with the “help” of the inevitable police brutality, this movement has struck a chord and gained popularity and sympathy among the larger public. The response from right-wing organs such as Fox News has been predictable. More unexpectedly, some on the left have issues as well. Here is Jodi Dean:

[T]he language of occupying occupy wall street that I am using suggests that any attempt to hegemonize the space will be a problem for the ‘movement.’ That is, to remain the movement it is (18 days in), it has to resist any and all efforts to channel the message. But that then implies not that the priority is a contestation among people to forge a way ahead but instead that openness and indeterminacy are themselves the goal, that which is to be protected. If that’s the case, then there is something wrong, a kind of built in (self-deceiving?) confusion: the goal is just to keep the occupation going, not to use the occupation to overthrow capitalism or bring down the banks, or redistribute wealth at all. In fact, it’s probably wrong for me to call this confused or self-deceiving: it’s explicit in a number of different statements about democracy and discussion and raising questions. This language is a language of process rather than ends. Or, the process is the end. To the extent that this is the goal, rather than a means of overthrowing capitalism and working toward putting in place a communist solution, then that’s not my revolution.

There is a lot going on in this single paragraph, almost all of which is troublesome. To begin with, Dean gives away the strawman quite explicitly in her very first sentence, with the  accurate qualifier that “the language of occupying occupy wall street” is one that she is using i.e., this is her take on it, and if her take or language leads to some “confusion” or “self-deception” it is not clear who else is to blame here!

And what exactly is a “language of process“, or a “language of ends“? I am pretty sure I don’t know. What is clear however is that Dean wants to lay down the terms on which she will consider Occupy Wall Street “her” revolution: the movement has to share her goal, without question, of a communist solution. Well, okay, that’s her call to make. Why we worry? The trouble I have with Dean’s post is the way she goes about making her point, using all sorts of bad faith hypotheticals, logical leaps, and by playing games with the meaning of words like “process” and “goal”.

One example is Dean’s worry about the presence of Ron Paulites:

To the extent that Occupy Wall Street remains open to and for multiple political persuasions, it is not a left movement at all.  […] As I understand it, Ron Paul supports an odd notion of free markets; he thinks that individuals make better decisions than groups and that a social safety net damages freedom. If there is space for this view in Occupy Wall Street, then that’s not my revolution. In fact, it seems like a version of the one that hijacked the country in the 70s.

What is “space for this view“, per Dean, and how do the protestors please Dean by purging the movement of such space? Should they chase away Paul leafletters hovering around the periphery? Should they not  listen to them should Paulites attempt to start a discussion? Dean’s own hypothetical extent to which OWS is “open” to alternate “persuasions” or provides “a space” for them, is evidence (“it seems“) that OWS is out to hijack the country. In this analysis, it’s a direct route from hypotheticals (“to the extent that“, “if there is space“) to conclusions.

Another example is the first section quoted above, where Dean condenses all the varied procedures, activities, slogans and positions of OWS to a matter of obsession with “process“. Out of the Brownian flurry of hypotheses bouncing around in her own mind, Dean builds a caricature of a movement — not a movement that is occupying a space to achieve goals (explicitly stated in their statements and placards); not a movement trying to avoid co-option by staying open (while also guarded) to ideas and arguments; but really rather a movement in love with its on machinations and minutiae.

What do we make of the  analysis that people have occupied a park for the fun of the process of being open to Ron Paulites and for the thrill of continuing such occupation into the balmy days of winter, rather than the more probable case that they are using the occupation as a base for protests whose goals are made explicit in their slogans? What could the author possibly mean?

I suspect that to get to the content, you have to work through Dean’s post in a different sequence than top down. It is the Lenin references up front and the political identifications towards the end (“those of us who think of ourselves as communists, Leninists, Trotskyists…“) that provide the necessary backdrop for Dean’s dismissals: “that’s not my revolution” and “Occupy Wall Street … is not a left movement at all“. The contrast to watch for is not the one Dean draws between libertarianism and leftism:

The easiest rough initial cut is between those who begin with an emphasis on equality and those who begin with an emphasis on freedom; another crude cut would distinguish between those who begin from an emphasis on individualism and those who begin from an emphasis on collectivity, solidarity, and a commons.

For surely those actually collected in solidarity in the commons hardly need lecturing (a la Ricard Dawkins: by all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out) on libertarianism! Dean is of course not lecturing OWS. She is writing to that “those of us“, her people, and the contrast she draws out is really between the ideological commitment of those like her, and the open-ended process of discovery through action employed by OWS. We cannot take seriously the speculation that OWS is some sort of ISO9001 circle jerk. So, when she raises the suspicion that OWS may not be about “overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a communist solution“, the emphasis is likely on the latter part. The lack of a priori commitment to communism is Dean’s real issue. But there is good news. She is willing to wait for OWS to come around:

For those of us who think of ourselves as communists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and socialists, our challenge is finding ways to work within and together with the movement, which can well mean not pushing too quickly for something for which the proper support has not yet been built.

Or of course there is the alternate possibility. As a fellow subscriber on a left mailing list summarised this kind of analysis (using a quote that seems to be widely attributed to Mahatma Gandhi):

There go my people. I must run and catch up with them because I am their leader.

In the United States just after independence from Britain, the farmers of western Massachusetts, led by Daniel Shays and still in possession of their muskets, occupied the general courts to prevent bankers from obtaining judgements to confiscate farmers’ property for debt. The bankers in Boston succeeded in getting Continental troops to put down this rebellion, but all at the cost of considerable social upheaval. It is obviously in the interest of those who have power in society to prevent such violent and destructive conflicts, even if, with the police power of the state, they are sure to win.

As such struggles occur, institutions are created whose function is to forestall violent struggle by convincing people that the society in which they live is just and fair, or if not just and fair then inevitable, and that it is quite useless to resort to violence. There are the institutions of legitimation.

He’s speaking generally about equality, power and revolt, but he might as well have been speaking of the current financial crisis and the real function of Obama and the Democratic Party.

CQ.com reported Harman was overheard on a National Security Agency wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two AIPAC officials. In exchange for Harman’s help, CQ.com reported, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections.

According to one unnamed official cited by CQ.com, Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Hilarious stuff!

[From Congresswoman calls alleged wiretap ‘abuse of power’ – CNN.com]

Op-Ed Columnist – From Tehran to Tel Aviv – NYTimes.com

Still, this much is clear to me: Obama’s new Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement will involve reining in Israeli bellicosity and a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s about time. America’s Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy has been disastrous, not least for Israel’s long-term security.

[ Link ]

The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom: Scientific American

Professors routinely give advice to students but usually while their charges are still in school. Arthur Landy, a distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology and biochemistry at Brown University, recently decided, however, that he had to remind a former premed student of his that “without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense.”

The sentiment was not original with Landy, of course. Thirty-six years ago geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, a major contributor to the foundations of modern evolutionary theory, famously told the readers of The American Biology Teacher that “nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.” Back then, Dobzhansky was encouraging biology teachers to present evolution to their pupils in spite of religiously motivated opposition. Now, however, Landy was addressing Bobby Jindal—the governor of the state of Louisiana—on whose desk the latest antievolution bill, the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, was sitting, awaiting his signature.

Remembering Jindal as a good student in his genetics class, Landy hoped that the governor would recall the scientific importance of evolution to biology and medicine. Joining Landy in his opposition to the bill were the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which warned that “Louisiana will undoubtedly be thrust into the national spotlight as a state that pursues politics over science and education,” and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which told Jindal that the law would “unleash an assault against scientific integrity.” Earlier, the National Association of Biology Teachers had urged the legislature to defeat the bill, pleading “that the state of Louisiana not allow its science curriculum to be weakened by encouraging the utilization of supplemental materials produced for the sole purpose of confusing students about the nature of science.”

But all these protests were of no avail. On June 26, 2008, the governor’s office announced that Jindal had signed the Louisiana Science Education Act into law.

And this:

Many Indians born in America have tended to sympathise with other people of colour, identifying their lot with other immigrants, the poor, the underclass. Vinita Gupta, in Oklahoma, another largely white state, won her reputation as a crusading lawyer by taking up the case of illegal immigrants exploited by a factory owner (her story will shortly be depicted by Hollywood, with Halle Berry playing the Indian heroine). Bhairavi Desai leads a taxi drivers’ union; Preeta Bansal, who grew up as the only non-white child in her school in Nebraska, became New York’s Solicitor General and now serves on the Commission for Religious Freedom. None of this for Bobby. Louisiana’s most famous city, New Orleans, was a majority black town, at least until Hurricane Katrina destroyed so many black lives and homes, but there is no record of Bobby identifying himself with the needs or issues of his state’s black people. Instead, he sought, in a state with fewer than 10,000 Indians, not to draw attention to his race by supporting racial causes. Indeed, he went well beyond trying to be non-racial (in a state that harboured notorious racists like the Ku Klux Klansman David Duke); he cultivated the most conservative elements of white Louisiana society. With his widely-advertised piety (he asked his Indian wife, Supriya, to convert as well, and the two are regular churchgoers), Bobby Jindal adopted positions on hot-button issues that place him on the most conservative fringe of the Republican Party. Most Indian-Americans are in favour of gun control, support a woman’s right to choose abortion, advocate immigrants’ rights, and oppose school prayer (for fear that it would marginalise non-Christians). On every one of these issues, Bobby Jindal is on the opposite side. He’s not just conservative; on these questions, he is well to the right of his own party.

Since Jindal is a hard-core right-wing Christian fundamentalist, he must then believe that life begins at conception. In his case, that would imply that his own began back in the shameful backwaters of India.

[ Link ]

But I will tell you this, ma’am. I am not going to call up a soldier that’s fighting in Iraq today and tell him that I am going to deport his mother. I am not going to do that. YOU can do it. Okay?

Two things struck me about this (apart from the pandering about ‘securing the border’ etc): his direct and clear rejection of the mob, and the positive reaction that the rejection drew from the crowd. Obama fans speak of his inspirational or transformative capacity, but I doubt I have seen him take a clear and unpopular stand such as this and use that clarity and integrity to turn the crowd around.

Editorial – So Little Time, So Much Damage – NYTimes.com

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

[…]