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Andrew Ferguson profiles Rick Perry’s initiative’s in higher education.
If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.
In his 30-year public career, Perry?—?how to put this delicately??—?has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point average a bit over 2.0. (Perry’s A&M transcript was leaked last month to the left-wing blog Huffington Post by “a source in Texas,” presumably not his mom. How his GPA compares with Barack Obama’s is unknown, since no one in higher education has thought to leak Obama’s transcript to a right-wing blog.)
Perry expends his considerable intelligence instead on using political power and, what amounts to the same thing, picking fights with his political adversaries. When Rollins came to Perry in 2007 with a radical and comprehensive proposal to overhaul higher education in the state, Rollins says the governor quickly understood the potential of the issue, not only politically but on its merits. …
… In late August, Perry scored another significant, if partial, victory. The University of Texas regents approved an “action plan” proposed by the system’s chancellor, who isn’t a Perry appointee. The plan is a compromise, but it incorporates many of Perry’s ideas, including some of the most radical, such as “pay for performance” and “learning contracts” between schools and their students. Amazingly, the plan has won support from both the right (Brooke Rollins’s Texas Public Policy Foundation) and left (Karen Hughes’s group).
Reforms like these would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, before Perry picked up his stick and started poking the system until it had to respond. It’s been a remarkable display of political entrepreneurship: Create an issue, define it on your terms, cultivate public support, and your opponents, who never saw it coming, will have to go along, even if only partway?—?at first.
Victor Davis Hanson says the president’s quiver is empty.
Ex-president George W. Bush with accustomed candor once shrugged after the end of his eight-year presidency, “People were kind of tired of me.” That ennui happens eventually with most presidents. But in the case of Barack Obama, our modern Phaethon, his fiery crash is coming after 32, not 96, months.
We can sense the national weariness with Obama in a variety of strange and unexpected ways. There is the self-pitying anguish of liberal columnists who scapegoat him for turning the public against their own leftwing agenda. The current silence of “moderate” Republicans and conservative op-ed writers who once in near ecstasy jumped ship to join Obama is deafening. A growing number of Democratic representatives and senators up for reelection do not want their partisan president to visit their districts in the runup to November 2012. Approval ratings hover around 40 percent.
Perhaps strangest of all, there is now a collective “Been there, done that” any time Barack Obama walks up to the podium to give yet another teleprompted speech. …
Jennifer Rubin says now Dems are turning on Obama.
… When a president is failing, he acquires new troubles. Obama surely exemplifies this phenomenon. Obama’s jobs plan is now under assault from his own party. It sort of messes up his plan to run against the “do nothing” Republicans when Democrats mercilessly attack the plan.
The problems will soon multiply for Obama, as they do with any president who is on the ropes. How will he hold his troops in line for the remainder of his term? He won’t for now it is every man for himself. Can he expect Senate Democrats to block every effort from the House Republicans? Not if the red state Democrats want to win re-election.
It also poses some tricky problems for the 2012 campaign. What Democratic congressman in a swing state wants to be seen with him? …
Corner Post catches this on a Solyndra website;
“The leadership and actions of President Barack Obama, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the U.S. Congress were instrumental in concluding this offer for a loan guarantee,” said Solyndra CEO and founder, Dr. Chris Gronet. “The DOE Loan Guarantee Program funding will enable Solyndra to achieve the economies of scale needed to deliver solar electricity at prices that are competitive with utility rates. This expansion is really about creating new jobs while meaningfully impacting global warming.”
Michael Barone posts on Solyndra.
One factor favoring President Obama’s re-election, according to a recent article by political scientist Alan Lichtman, is the absence of scandal in his administration.
Lichtman may have spoken too soon.
The reason can be capsulized in a single word: Solyndra.
That’s the name of a company that manufactured solar panels in Fremont, Calif. (which voted 71 percent for Obama in 2008).
Solyndra was the first company to receive a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy as part of the 2009 stimulus package. This wasn’t small potatoes. The loan guarantee was for $535 million.
It was, Vice President Biden said, “exactly what the Recovery Act was all about.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner, said it would help “spark a new revolution that will put Americans to work.” It was part of the Obama administration’s program to create so-called “green jobs,” which we were told were the key to future economic growth. …
Allahpundit at Hot Air says the White House ignored three warnings about Solyndra.
That’s not all they ignored, either. According to e-mails obtained by the AP, one White House official who helped plan Obama’s big photo op at the plant earlier this year dismissed a news story about Solyndra’s financial troubles with, “Seems B.S.” A few months earlier, the same chump ignored the alarm bells being rung by accounting firms and instead accepted at face value Solyndra’s assurances that they were doing well, writing, “Fantastic to hear that business is doing well — keep up the good work! We’re cheering for you.”
Everyone knew the company was toast. Except the people in charge of your money. ”’
Alana Goodman says the administration has created green jobs at a cost of $5.5 million per job.
… The administration has already spent half of the initial $38.6 billion loan guarantees, which would be around $19.3 billion. And it’s “created” 3,500 jobs – at a cost of roughly $5.5 million per job. Numbers like these explain why Obama has been relatively quiet on “clean energy” funding during his latest jobs push. Notice it hasn’t been popping up in his speeches lately. Obama’s getting attacked by environmental groups for it, but politically it’s his only option.
And for the White House, there couldn’t be a worse time for this information to come out. August wasn’t a kind month to Obama, but his jobs plan isn’t saving him from a September that’s shaping up to be even worse. As James Carville advised earlier today, “What should the White House do now? One word came to mind: Panic.”
James Pethokoukis explains how the “stimulus” and “jobs act” really work.
The point of President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act is, well, to create jobs. And the sooner the better, right? Unemployment is above 9 percent, and everyone from Wall Street to the Congressional Budget Office to the White House now thinks that number isn’t going to improve anytime soon. Thus Obama’s new $450 billion stimulus plan. But since this new proposal is structured just like 2009?s $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it should be no surprise that it contains many of the same flaws as Stimulus 1.0….
Good News! Andrew Malcolm says Dennis “the menace” Kucinich may loose his house seat.
Well, it looks like the new congressional redistricting will help Ohio get rid of at least one long-term Democratic representative in next year’s House elections.
According to newly drawn district lines set to go to the Ohio Legislature any day, eight-term Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland and 15-term Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo are both in the same new narrow district running along the southern Lake Erie shoreline. Both have announced their candidacies.
The Buckeye state is home to House Speaker John Boehner and is losing two of its current 18 House seats.
Corner Post says England is getting down on it’s bullies; especially those who call other kids, “broccoli heads.”
The Daily Mail reports that more than 20,000 British nursery and elementary schoolchildren ages 3–11 have been registered in a national database for uttering words perceived as “racist.”
Under anti-bullying laws, school authorities are required to report incidents of name calling to the Department for Education. One tyke was placed in the registry for calling another a “broccoli head.” Naturally, the bien pensants identified him as a budding Klansman. Thus branded, the information tracks the students to subsequent schools and may be accessed by future employers.
Think that’s a bit too 1984 for the U.S.? Think again. The U.S. Department of Education is seeking to expand its authority over school bullying and some proponents of the expansion seem to view the First Amendment as a minor impediment to bringing a British-style anti-bullying regime to America.
The U.S.Commission on Civil Rights will be issuing a report on the matter shortly. Kindly check out the dissents of Commissioners Gaziano, Heriot, and Kirsanow.