“The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private,” wrote columnist Kathleen Parker about Christopher Buckley’s decision to endorse Barack Obama and resign from National Review, the publication that his father, William F. Buckley, founded. “Years of pandering to the extreme wing – the ‘kooks’ the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right – have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.”
Though many conservatives have treated Buckley as a traitor, Parker contends that he is demonstrating his father’s swashbuckling, defiant spirit in reminding Republicans of how far they have strayed off course.
John McCain’s efforts to distance himself from President Bush appear to be making some progress, the Washington Post reported. Among independents, 54 percent now see him as offering a new direction. That’s up from 44 percent before the third presidential debate, when McCain declared that “I am not George Bush.” McCain has been airing a campaign commercial in which he looks into the camera and says, “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?”
When ABC’s “Nightline” visited El Dorado, hometown of Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, as part of the “50 States in 50 Days” series, it found no one willing to predict Obama would beat John McCain there on Nov. 4. Republican Mike Cooper told ABC that when Obama visited Butler Community College in January, “I had several customers that I had talked with who lived in the area, and three or four of them said anybody with the name Barack Hussein Obama shouldn’t even be here.”
Teachers have the right to express their political preferences so long as their doing so does not interfere with their job and the education of their students. A good argument can be made that political buttons and the like can spark classroom discussion about the candidates, politics and government. It can be educational for students to know what the issues are, and to form their own opinions about the election. It is hard to see how wearing a campaign button would disrupt education, Such expression would be more likely to enhance it. Suppression of political views sends the wrong message to students. – Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times editorial
If teachers are using them as political billboards – announcing their partisan identifications from their chests – the question of the intrusion of politics in the classroom cannot be avoided. One way of answering it is to claim that teachers who wear campaign buttons are performing a valuable educational purpose. But you don’t have to be overtly partisan in order to proclaim the virtue of participating in the political process. You can get that message across with a button that reads “I will vote on Nov. 4.” But what about a faculty member’s rights? This is the most often voiced objection to a button ban. It curtails the constitutionally protected speech of teachers. When faculty members are not in class, they remain free to sport their buttons, and when they leave the campus, the employer has no say at all about what they do or do not wear. – Stanley Fish, New York Times
