Obama locks doors to hope

Benjamin Franklin found many of his countrymen despicable but none quite so like the pretenders huddled in government halls: “A publick Hypocrite every day deceives his betters, and makes them Ignorant Trumpeters of his supposed Godliness.” Politicians wear their contradictions like tailored suits, with smooth smugness and a smile that tapers. None look better doing this than President Barack Obama, a man whose self-assurance is impeccable but on the subject of school choice unravels.

The young president is expert at sewing rationale that masks frayed logic – insisting he does not want to run car companies after showing a CEO the door, that he does not want to run banks after having taken them over and that he believes in free markets while dismantling them. Many Americans, eager to believe their own euphoria, gaze upon the random fluttering threads and, like a fashion designer blind to his own bad look, see only perfection. But for Obama on Tuesday, there were clashes and tears.

People marched in Washington for civil rights, a kind the primary tenant of the White House ignores in the fashion of Napoleon of “Animal Farm,” having moved into the farmhouse while his friends remain in the barn. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, appointed by Obama, has cut off scholarships under Washington, D.C.’s popular school voucher program for low-income students. Congress plans to phase out the federal program next year. Obama evidently plans to watch it happen.

Almost 1,700 black and Hispanic students receive $7,500 scholarships to attend private schools, affording them the same privilege accorded Obama’s two children and steering them out of Washington’s public school system, which is among America’s worst. Two groups rallied Tuesday at Freedom Plaza near district city government offices: “D.C. families,” a flier declared, “deserve the same kind of choices that the Mayor, City Council Members, and Federal leaders with children have.”

Indeed, more than a third of members of the Senate and House who have children send them to private schools. Still, there’s more.

Obama initially opposed vouchers saying they removed focus and money from the more important job of rebuilding public schools. This is duplicitous. There has been no definitive link shown between money and public school quality; many of the most heavily funded public schools are also the most woeful. So then Obama shifted, saying he might consider vouchers provided they “work.”

Well, Mr. President, they do in D.C. The Department of Education says students there under the voucher program have carved out sizable academic gains and narrowed the racial achievement gap.

So what now? How about a bit of truth: Obama and many fellow Democrats rely heavily on the financial and voter support of teacher unions, which vigorously oppose school choice under the rhetorical auspices of safeguarding public schools and the literal aim of safeguarding union dues. Members of both parties who attempt to breach that rampart find themselves pounding heads against walls of iron. Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, knows the feeling. He has proposed school voucher initiatives for years to no avail.

Here Obama the State Hypocrite is exposed, waving banners of class warfare in pushes to redistribute wealth through taxes, seizing a privilege that wealth provides and then denying the same to minorities in the city that surrounds him. Obama knows education is the best pathway out of the economic despair that pervades beyond Oval Office walls. But tucking campaign dollars and votes in his pocket he remains tucked in the union pocket, denying a dash of hope to those who need it most.

Some contradictions can be worn with flair. In this, the president is revealed as a pretender in clothes that even he cannot wear well.