July 28, 2008

McCain Addresses NAACP

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:46PM

• Comment Now
• Email
• Print
• Reprints
• Share

Lots of happenings in the past few weeks to catch up on, perhaps none more interesting than a speech given by Senator McCain to the NAACP two weeks ago where he officially unveiled his education platform for the presidential campaign.

While the edu-world consensus seems to be that there wasn't too much in the way of earth-shattering policy suggested in the speech, there were at least a couple items that caught my attention.

The first observation has to do with the over-arching positioning behind Senator McCain's proposals. It's pretty clear that he has no intent of making education anything close to a center-piece of his campaign, instead choosing to allow education to serve as an echo and reinforcement of themes upon which he and his advisors have already bet their campaign livelihoods. For instance, the second and third sentences of his education platform declare:

"Now is the time to demand real, new reform earned through discipline, grinding work, tough choices and leadership. John McCain has dedicated his career in public service to the hard and sometimes unpopular work of achieving meaningful reform."

Sure, sounds great, but I couldn't help but notice that the same two lines could have been used in a campaign statement on health care, energy policy, campaign finance, the housing crisis--heck the two lines could be an intro to Senator McCain's position on Major League Baseball and steroids. My point here is not to criticize the Senator, especially since he has some thoughtful viewpoints on teacher pay, teacher recruitment, and school choice later on in his plan. But I do mean to point out that the first question his campaign asked when weaving an education platform was not, "what is best for children?" but rather, "what makes the most sense for this campaign?" To be fair, Senator Obama has arguably done the same on the issue.

Second observation has to do with Senator McCain's opponent and the issue of race. He spent a good minute in the opening of his speech praising Mr. Obama in front of a predominately African-American audience, both graciously and eloquently. But I wonder how much of Senator McCain's remarks and choice of venues--in front of the very same NAACP that he refused to speak at in 2007--have to do with this recent poll from the Public Education Network that shows that African American and Latinos actually support the No Child Left Behind Act more than do white voters, by a pretty significant 3-to-2 margin.