Colorado Progressive

Last week I wrote about Patrick Ruffini’s discussion of Republicans’ policy failure on health care. If anyone read Ruffini’s whole post, you’d have seen that, never mind his generally sensible takedown of Republican strategy, he wrote some delusional prose about No Child Left Behind.

At the outset of his Administration, George W. Bush set out to neutralize a key Democratic issue, education, with his No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB was a grab bag and not beloved by conservatives for its massive expansion in Federal spending in education, but it did insist on the vaguely conservative principle of accountability.

The merits of that legislation can continue to be debated, but one political outcome is clear. We don’t talk much about education at the federal level these days. There is a sense that the problem was “solved” by NCLB, which is now nearly a decade old. Likewise, no one will try to move welfare reform legislation because the successful 1996 reform law substantively and politically took the wind out of the sails of that issue.

Emphasis mine. The notion that there’s a perception, even a political perception, that education has been “solved” in this country, let alone by NCLB, leaves me completely bejabbered. Ruffini invokes education as the model from which Republicans might have mapped a plan to reach a more politically desirable set of circumstances surrounding health care while Bush was in office. That’s all fine and good, and perhaps Ruffini is on to something in his observation that good-faith Republican policy efforts peel away planks from the Democratic political platform. But invoking NCLB? Seriously?

For days, I’ve been wondering if anybody else caught that and whether I’m the only one who thinks Ruffini is completely nuts in his assessment. Today, Kevin Drum pulls numbers on NCLB and public opinion. Click here for the chart, which is worth the trip.

That’s pretty remarkable. Not only is NCLB massively unpopular a decade after it was passed, but it’s about equally unpopular with both Democrats and Republicans. Everyone hates it. If Barack Obama really wants to bring the nation together, it sounds like deep sixing NCLB completely might be a pretty good way to do it.

Very good, then. If by “solved” Ruffini means that no one favors the Bush education legacy, then we can all agree and call it a day.