Our esteemed local Gannett newspaper has above the fold today the introduction to a pretty interesting tit-for-tat kerfuffle between Governor Mitch Daniels and the teachers union, which Daniels blames for illegal activities that supposedly brought down Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett.
I like Mitch. I’ve voted for him. I’ll probably like a lot about his tenure at Purdue starting next month (happy December, by the way). But I have two beefs with him:
- The reckless glee with which he (though his FSSA head) destroyed our former system for administering Medicaid. I will now acknowledge that Modernization 2.0 is starting to work. But a lot of poor people fell through the safety net during Modernization 1.0, for which only the most willfully blind would have predicted success since the
private contractorscarpetbaggers picked to implement it had an unbroken record of failure in other states. - The sour grapes with which he’s greeting Tony Bennett’s defeat. I guarantee you, gentle reader, that Bennett’s defeat had to do with a lot more than ticking off the teachers’ union (and local school superintendents, be it noted), with vouchers and charter schools. Some of Bennett’s mandates were resisted as sheer, willful idiocy by teachers and staff in the very private schools that are accepting vouchers. Tipsy knows this with a high degree of confidence. Tipsy trusts his sources enough that he didn’t vote for Bennett.
Maybe a measure of willfulness is the dark underbelly of a genius at political reform. There’s no doubt that Medicaid reform is a necessity (just listen to Purdue’s Larry DeBoer talk about the challenge of state budgeting some time). But I don’t have to pretend the underbelly isn’t dark because the top is cute and furry.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 