Freedom Line Blog

The news just keeps getting worse for the primary resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  With his party facing historic defeat in the congressional midterms, President Barack Obama should also be worried about the coming crack-up among two vital parts of his base: teachers unions and wealthy liberal donors.  The first wants job protection; the latter better student outcomes.

Their collision course is expertly analyzed by Alvin Felzenberg.  A sample:

We have seen hints of rising tensions between these two elements of the president’s base for over a year. First, there came David Callahan’s “Traitors to their Class: The New Super Rich,” in the New Yorker, an account of how the information-based elites that rallied to Barack Obama break with their fellow Democrats on such matters as free trade, “card check,” and, yes, public sector monopolies over the delivery of education. There was the now infamous District of Columbia mayoral primary, which pit the reformist mayor Adrian Fenty against challenger Vincent Gray. No issue sparked greater controversy than the record of school superintendent Michelle Rhee, who Obama publicly hailed along with Fenty in a televised presidential debate. And no public official prior to Rhee has spent more time thinking of what D.C. children should be taught and evaluated since Thomas Jefferson. While Rhee proved Fenty’s greatest asset in his re-election campaign, the unions clearly did a better job in getting out the vote than did parents whose children benefitted from Rhee’s efforts.

Read the entire article here.

H/T: U.S. News & World Report