The Outstater
An Unconscious Indiana GOP
IF YOU ARE ONLY slightly concerned about the efficacy of Indiana’s Republican officeholders, attend one of their fundraisers. You will be deeply concerned
I’m not talking about their policy proposals, the usual fare of quasi-reforms and adjustments to what would soon return to a status quo ante. What is concerning, existentially concerning, is their unawareness of how desperate the rest of us feel about the direction of our state and nation.
For everything is hunky-dory in Indianapolis. The super-majority, bolstered with new conservative voters activated by the national debate, appears to be secure. The legislators and legislators-turned-lobbyists at the fundraiser talked about going out and shaking hands, but with a single exception — a member of this foundation, I am proud to say — the tone was of siding salesmen sizing up a gullible customer base.
No, that’s unfair to siding salesmen, who create value in a competitive market. Nor is it fair to the legislators, hard-working albeit go-along fellows who may have had their guard down at a gathering of friends and donors. And as my colleague Jim O’Donnell wrote earlier this week, they are giving us the representation we deserve.
Still, that fundraiser would have been a perfect setting for serious and perhaps agonizing reappraisal for the legislators. For the truth is that few outside the room like or respect them.
That’s not personal, it’s a documented assessment of their performance in leadership, their primary job lest we forget. Some public opinion polls rank them near 15 percent approval, or the percentage of addled people wandering around at any given time. And for a Republican legislator, keeping government spending more or less in budgetary line, as one boasted, shouldn’t be an achievement, it should be a job requirement.
The legislators, arranged in a panel as if celebrities, were asked their most notable achievement. The answer from one, formerly in senior leadership, was telling, so permit me to relate it at some length.
He recalled the day a black single mother working two jobs approached him to say that she couldn’t find her son a good school (despite a $9.4-billion state education budget?). Our kind-hearted legislator was able to direct the boy to a privately funded choice program.
Good for him but that, as a niece of mine might say, is “so last year.” In fact, it is more like “so last decade.” It was at least 10 years that a blueprint for education reform sat unaddressed in front of the GOP leadership. And in 2001, a scholar from our foundation presented a committee chairman a related $50,000 study on why parental choice was critical to that reform. The study cited almost three decades of research, surveyed every school district in the state and took a year to complete.
Despite laudatory reviews from the (old)Indianapolis Star and others, it was shoved back across the table with a dismissive, “I couldn’t get that out of committee,” which, the chairman was reminded, was his job and not ours. Thousands of young lives would have been improved during that time if their parents could have picked the best school for their child. And when a choice policy was finally put in place it contained a poison pill, e.g., vouchers instead of tax credits (which would have set parents truly free and removed government from the education game).
And so, after all these years, that’s what makes them proud?
Two more things. First, we don’t need GOP legislators championing preferential treatment for apocryphal single black mothers or anyone else. We have the Democrat Party for that, throwing a couple of trillion dollars in that direction since the Great Society. What we need is for Republican leadership to protect the well-being and self-reliance of all hard-working American families, black, white or whatever. The other guys, envy-driven and addicted to identity politics, will never do that.
Second, government-steered vouchers have done what we would have thought impossible: degrade both the public and the private schools. The discouraging elements of monopoly public education — i.e., management indifference, uniform salary schedules, social-justice curriculums and centralized control — now are seeping into all schools systems. Our school “choice” threatens to become restaurants serving only different recipes for broccoli.
None of that came up at the fundraiser. Another friend, an economist, has an explanation. He talks about “the 10 percent rule,” that is, if a budget or operation doesn’t change by at least 10 percent, which usually requires systemic reform, you haven’t changed anything. My impression is that Indiana’s ruling class is making a good living keeping things within that 10 percent while taking credit for any incremental improvements.
Serious leadership, though, will involve more than that. — tcl
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