So Sen. David Vitter flopped/evolved
on the issue of the Common Core
State Standards, pursuant to his quest for the governorship of Louisiana
next year. It should have come as no surprise, given what strategy has taken him
to his present lofty political heights, but it likely won’t make much policy
difference even should he win.
The Republican has ascended to
becoming the most consequential of his party in the state’s history because he
has done well to meld principled conservatism with the anti-conservative populism
declining but still ingrained in the state’s political culture. While never
being mistaken for anything but a genuine conservative – his lifetime American
Conservative Union voting scorecard record in Congress being 92.4
– his occasional
forays into populist issues that seek to portray him as fighting for the
common man against oppressive bureaucracy that favors special interests at the
little guy’s expense allow him to tap into the political right’s less-reasoned,
more-visceral conservative strain of populism.
Common Core is an issue made to
take on populist interpretations, on which both the left and right have jumped wholeheartedly.
While the left spins fables that the enterprise, which identifies learning
methods and creates learning goals that should be reached by these, constitutes
some kind of corporate takeover of education designed to line pockets of
bogeymen and to grind teachers into dust, the right has more rational concerns
that standards of achievement will mutate into national control of education
content by an aggressive federal government. Either line fits into a populist
paradigm.
Vitter only months ago gave general
approval to CCSS, but now insists that after further data has come his way,
echoing the same journey Gov. Bobby
Jindal says he made, he sees too much impending evidence that the federal
government potentially can grab control of the movement in a way to reconfigure
standards into content. Now he argues that Louisiana should come up with its
own standards and tests – the latter paralleling Jindal’s unverified assertion
that testing inevitably must drive curricula.
By this reversal, Vitter adds this
populist issue to the portfolio of traditional conservative preferences where
he stands unquestioned ideologically. It pulls more wind out of the sails of a
potential populist conservative challenger such as state Treasurer John
Kennedy and even takes a bit away from the current Democrat consolation
candidate state Rep. John Bel
Edwards, who slowly has been edging towards CCSS opposition in order to
keep his Angry Left base in the fold and thereby discourage other liberals from
running. Since the other two announced candidates, Republican Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service
Commissioner Scott Angelle do not
declare a pox on CCSS, Vitter’s declaration has given him as an electoral home
to many conservative CCSS opponents who likely outnumber whatever supporters of
it who will flee him as a result of this conversion.
Whether this has any substantive
policy impact is another matter. In the short run, while some
may argue that it adds impetus to CCSS repeal efforts – because education
policy-making is left in the hands of the Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education and its appointed superintendent that only state law can override its
wishes and its current majority favors CCSS – by giving moral support to
anti-CCSS legislators, that position still seems favored only by a distinct
minority of legislators who could not even get any anti-CCSS bill to a floor
vote by passage out of a committee. Both chairmen of their respective chambers’
education committees, Republicans state Rep. Steve Carter and
state Sen. Conrad Appel, favor CCSS and
it seems likely both would be able to hold enough committee members in line to
prevent committee passage of similar bills next year.
The year after could be a different
matter if Vitter, so far favored in polls, wins. If CCSS opposition becomes a
big enough issue preference, it could be that enough legislators with anti-CCSS
views get elected or adopt them to force BESE into doing an about-face. As
well, if that also becomes a prominent stance among victors in the BESE
contests held simultaneously, whether through defeat of incumbents or their
changing of minds that, separately or together, also could cause reversal. And
a governor can help BESE decide things his way as he have three appointment to
the 11-person body.
But several factors make this
unlikely. Vitter’s policy agenda will be crowded and he may not feel able to
commit enough political capital to such a move depending upon his ambitions for
other items on it. Carter and Appel look like probable reelection candidates,
so Vitter would have to use resources to depose them and then try to build
majorities. Many incumbent pro-CCSS legislators will win reelection because it
is one among many issues and only a distinct minority of voters will see it as
a make-or-break stance in their voting decision, so, depending on the results,
that may be a bridge too far for him.
Vitter could try to follow his lead
of the past by tipping the scales in his favor through aggressive resource
direction to compatible legislative candidates. Intervention by his Louisiana
Committee for a Republican Majority political action committee may
have help some GOP legislators to victory in 2011. But then he had the
luxury of being a just-reelected senator; in 2015, he’ll also be fighting for
governor and would be unlikely to divide attention and resources into helping
certain candidates who if they failed to win would leave opponents antagonized by
that action.
Or he could take a cue from Jindal,
who in those 2011
elections aided several BESE candidates in their victories that brought a
pro-reform majority to the panel. By doing the same in regards to an anti-CCSS
majority, he could get BESE to dump CCSS on its own, especially as the policy
agenda for BESE being so much narrower than for the Legislature means that the
CCSS issue will loom much larger in voters’ decisions. However, Jindal had the
luxury of a huge amount of resources and no quality opposition to his reelection
bid, while Vitter in all likelihood would have nothing to spare in fending off by
the looks of it at least a few quality challengers, so it would seem
inopportune for him to mount even a minor effort to influence those elections.
Maybe things will fall into place
for Vitter and the environment from 2016 on will be much more favorable for
some kind of CCSS repeal. Yet that’s far from certain, and one other factor
will provide a brake on that kind of effort: by the time he would be in any
position to obstruct CCSS in any way, already Louisiana schools will have experienced
three years under the program. It may be so burrowed in by that time that
Herculean efforts and Croesus-like money (a new testing regime, even if part of
the transformation involved getting rid of the law that requires a
test that can be compared to other states, still would cost millions of dollars
and considerable time to concoct) would make it cost-ineffective to undo.
Vitter may know this in fact, and
thereby could view his new articulation as lip service. But do not mistake it for
empty posturing out of political convenience. For Vitter’s political career is
entirely consistent with preaching on the populist side here and there, so it’s
probably not so much calculation as it is his nature to surrender to a populist
orientation in the case of CCSS.
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