Sounds like it here in this CNN interview he had with John King:
KING:: We saw the mayor up in Northwest and a woman who had just voted there and one of my neighbors said last night that I would have voted for Vince Gray but I wanted to keep Michelle Rhee so I voted for Mayor Fenty.
If you win this election, can you keep her?
GRAY:: Well, we'll see. I've said many times that education reform has to be about more than one person. And I have been a strong proponent of education reform. I have indicated that I am going to continue with education reform. I helped to shepherd the legislation through the council in the first place. I'm going to continue with a very strong chancellor. We are going to have a birth-through-24 approach. We are going to frankly involve all the stakeholders in how we make our decisions and restore fiscal responsibility to our schools. And I have said on many occasions that after this election is over, I'd like to sit down with Michelle Rhee and let us walk and talk through it, you know, how we might work together.
KING: Would you like her to stay?
GRAY:: Well, we -- we'll decide that. I think that's a conversation that she and I, you know, need to have in terms of what's important to her with respect to what she's looking for in a mayor and the things that I think are important to me as a Mayor.
Notice CNN's John King using his neighbor's "I would have voted for Gray but I wanted Rhee to stay" jive in the interview.
Of course John King's neighbor wanted Rhee to stay.
He/she is no doubt an affluent white person in an affluent white neighborhood and as we have seen from the polls taken, affluent white people in D.C. want Rhee to stay to keep all those scary students of color and lazy unionized teachers under control.
That, really, is what "education reform" is all about to most of the people like John King's neighbor (or for that matter media people like John King.)
I hope I'm wrong about this, but I can see Gray being bought off post-election and Rhee getting to stay around to fire the other 75% of D.C. teachers who haven't already been fired or declared "ineffective" and slated for firing next year.
RESULTS HERE at the Kaplan Test Prep Post.
UPDATE: 10:19 PM and D.C. still hasn't started counting votes (or at least the Kaplan Test prep Post hasn't posed any results.)
Screw it - off to bed.
I can wait until morning to see whether hedge fund money bought Fenty (and thus Rhee) another term or if they'll have to spend a little more to bribe Gray to keep her.
Gray will be under immense pressure to keep Rhee. The malanthropists will threaten to yank the money they're contributing to the pound-of-flesh wage increases in the new contract, Duncan will expectorate on the issue, etc.
ReplyDeleteMy sense is that he'll either keep her until she commits the inevitable gaffe that will give him a pretext (as if one were needed), or that he has intended to keep her all along, and was just using his supposed opposition to her to garner votes.
Michael, I expect you are right. I think Gray intended to keep her all along. He played the anti-Rhee'ers for fools, now he'll have his hand out and the hedge fundies will provide him with walking around cash (as they did for Little Andy Cuomo) and Rhee will be around for another four years.
ReplyDeleteUnless that fixing of her KJ's sexual assault brings her down. But you never hear much about that anymore...