Early Thursday morning, Sen. Kevin Bryant put up a post (referring from padded-cell winner Michelle Malkin) citing an English lord making remarks to the effect of President Barack Obama ceding American sovereignty. One would have thought this sort of silliness would have been shut down in the ’50s, or when the John Birch Society was at its height of yelling at clouds.
Why is this something that people, elected officials, are concerned about enough to post? There are enough real issues for conservatives to nail the Obama administration with. You can call your shot, between health care, cap and trade, Iraq, Afghanistan, and on and on. This is why the voters haven’t gone wholesale to the GOP, as this year so closely resembles 1993.
Really, what the fuck? The spin is eerily reminiscent of the sort of thing we’d hear from the fools who advised the George W. Bush administration and the early-aughts Congress. Those guys thought it was a brilliant idea to take a machete to taxes for the wealthiest Americans, while going after middle-class college students. Seriously, they cut taxes for millionaires while eliminating parts of the Pell Grant program and giving finance companies a gift by allowing them to outrageously jack up interest rates on student loans.
One of the saving graces of the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 was actually doing a damn about student aid. But, being Democrats, it was a weak effort and spaced out over a long enough period that they might as well have done nothing. Tip o’ the hat, U.S. Reps. Pelosi and Hoyer.
See, here’s the thing: higher education isn’t an elective anymore. This is a knowledge-based economy. Unless you’re a from a wealthy, connected family that can get you into Yale with shitty grades, or an overachiever with no life, you’re going to need grants and loans to get by if you want a college degree. Yeah, you can take 12-16 hours a semester and work a part-time job and still try to do it, but you need help. Hell, we had to explain the entire thing to our parents, who didn’t understand. Selling off the last bit of the family plantation financed our dad’s education, and our mom is the offspring of union members. Between years of slavery and collectivism (respectively), they were covered. The 21st century, though, is a different place.
You want to win elections? Tell parents who are looking at balance statements that you know how to make sure their children get a proper education, and in a way to where you aren’t raiding the parents’ wallets. That’s what people care about. If you think the average voter is obsessively concerned about U.N. troops patrolling Five Points, you’d be very mistaken.
