The first day of the strike, according to the authoritative Substance News, 50,000 Chicagoans surrounded the downtown city block housing the Chicago Board of Education. Teachers union leaders have staked their future on aggressively reaching out for alliances with community and parent groups. They know they've got no strike fund to fall back on, and no radio or TV stations to combat the flood of lies and disinformation about them. Polls taken by the Chicago Sun-Times, a local newspaper vigorously opposed to public school teachers, show 47% of those questioned supporting the teachers at the strike's outset. Across the country, not just in Chicago, President Obama's education policies are deeply and widely unpopular among the constituencies he needs to win the election. But fortunately for the president, corporations have for some time failed to fund much in the way of journalism, so many Democratic voters don't necessarily connect him with those policies.
Hence Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is able to muddy the water for his boss by declaring his neutrality in the strike. Mitt Romney on the other hand is free to paint some imaginary distance between the two parties by embracing Rahm Emanuel and accusing Obama of siding with Chicago teachers. But it's all campaign smoke and mirrors. Chicago Democrat Rahm Emanuel isn't coloring outside the lines of his president's policies on public education. He's been carrying them out to the letter, trying his level best to make Chicago into Providence Rhode Island, where school officials simply fired ALL the teachers, or Detroit, which largely dismantled its public schools, or New Orleans, where Arne Duncan's predecessor as Chicago schools CEO Paul Vallas closed more than a hundred public schools after laying waste to public education in Philadelphia.
Obama is the worst Democratic president since James Buchanan, while Arne Duncan is the worst cabinet choice EVER.
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