With the debates behind us, and just a week of swing state campaigning ahead, the race for the Presidency is once again a close, polarized affair, between two very different choices.
With the RNC and DNC conventions over, the clear winner, based on current polling, appears to be President Obama.
”Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.” Nate Silver in The New York Times.
Let's take a look at the state of play. First, Real Clear Politics has the race essentially unchanged from last week, with President Obama having 221 electoral college votes to Mitt Romney's 191, 126 are listed as toss-ups
In Ohio, RCP has Obama's lead increasing from an average of 1.4% to 2.2%
538, whom we quoted up top, has the President's advantage increasing by 10 electoral college votes, and now stands at landslide levels of 318.8
In Ohio his chances of victory have also increased and now stand at 74.6%, up from 71.5 last week.
Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown Law student whom Rush Limbaugh called a "slut" because she advocates for contraception coverage, criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney during her speech at the Democratic Convention Wednesday night, saying he failed to stand up for her.
"Your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs," Fluke said. "Who won't stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party."
Romney was widely criticized earlier this year when he responded weakly to Limbaugh. "I'll just say this," he told reporters. "It's not the language I would have used."
Fluke contrasted Romney's reaction to that of President Obama, who embraced and defended her after the incident.
"Our president, when he hears a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters -- not his delegates or donors -- and stands with all women," she said. "And strangers come together, reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here -- and give me a microphone -- to amplify our voice. That's the difference."
Clinton saved the zinger for tax cuts for the rich, warning that Romney will "double down on trickle-down."
He paraphrased Ronald Reagan: "As another president once said, 'There they go again."
In reframing last week's GOP message, he employed equal parts mockery, wonkery and plainspeak.
In short, he said, the Republicans came to Tampa to deliver a simple message about Obama: "We left him a total mess, but he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in."
Clinton hit Paul Ryan in the same style. The GOP vice presidential candidate had attacked Obama for cutting $716 billion from Medicare, when his own budget proposal included those same cuts.
"You gotta give him one thing. It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did," Clinton said.
With congress unable to pass any meaningful legislation, the executive branch has wielded ever greater power in the education policy setting realm, most notably using Race to the Top to bribe cash strapped states to compete with each other in a race to implement all manner of unproven education reforms.
No doubt then, whomever wins the voters approval this coming November to become President, will have a large impact on public education and education policy for at least the next 4 years.
So it is, that tonight is the first step in selecting the next President, the Iowa caucuses. Where members of the Iowa Republican party will select their preferred candidate to face President Obama in November. (the Democrats will select a candidate too, but President Obama is unchallenged). For how this caucus works, the Desmoines Register has a handy guide.
We thought it would be useful to provide a guide on what each of the main GOP Presidential candidates have put forth as their education agenda.
Mitt Romney
A quick look at Mitt Romney's campaign website reveals that education isn't a priority. Under his issues tab he lists only jobs, healthcare and foreign policy. We have to turn to third party reporting then to discern his intentions. A reading of various articles reveals a candidate who falls in the corporate education reform camp. More testing, teachers with less influence, pay for test results. While he once supported the abolition of the Department of Education, he has since changed that stance.
Ron Paul works towards the elimination of the inefficient Department of Education, leaving education decisions to be made at the state, local or personal level. Parents should have the right to spend their money on the school or method of schooling they deem appropriate for their children.
It was arduous researching into Ron Paul's political positions as one quickly descends in to a carnival of the bizarre. This post sums up the problem quite well.
Education reform has been a top priority for Governor Perry during his 20 years of public service. He has worked to raise the overall quality of education in Texas by aligning the higher education standards more closely with the needs of business, balancing accountability with incentives for teacher and school performance and increasing the emphasis on core subject areas like math, reading and science.
One of the most memorable policy positions Rick Perry has put forth has been his desire to abolish the Department of Education
Rick Santorum doesn't have any education policy listed on his campaign website. This seems to be an evolving theme of the Republican candidates, and one we find troubling.
Perhaps his largest contribution to education policy was the "Santorum Amendment", which Wikipedia describes as follows
The Santorum Amendment was an amendment to the 2001 education funding bill which became known as the No Child Left Behind Act, proposed by then-Republican United States Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania, which promotes the teaching of intelligent design while questioning the academic standing of evolution in U.S. public schools. Though the amendment only survives in modified form in the Bill's Conference Report and does not carry the weight of law, as one of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns it became a cornerstone in the intelligent design movement's "Teach the Controversy" campaign.
On Friday, he said people often ask what he would do at a federal level to promote his education ideas.
"I say darn little, other than talking about it. One of the things a president can do and it's important for a president to do is lead a discussion about important things in America," Santorum said.
Those are the positions, as best as we could discern, of each of the current top tier candidates in the GOP primary as they head in to tonight's Iowa caucus. According to the reputable polling prognosticator, 538, here's the current polling state of play
