Pelosi May Be An Ally In The Fight Against Obama's Privatization Agenda For Schools

The news came yesterday that David Axelrod will be leaving the White House in the spring to begin overseeing the Obama 2012 re-election campaign.

They're already working on the messaging.

The Obama White House is laying blame for the previous two years of failures by blaming Rahm Emanuel.

And they're getting ready to appeal to independents and moderates by compromising on all sorts of liberal sacred cows like extending the Bush tax cuts for really rich people and raising the Social Security retirement age to 69.

No Child Left Behind is up for re-authorization and there has been all kinds of talk from the administration - including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama himself - about all the groovy kinds of compromise we're going to have on education issues.

In fact, the president is expected to spend a portion of the SOTU address on education, calling for a longer school day/year, more charter schools, more rigorous teacher accountability measures based upon test scores and merit pay for teachers.

Now some of that agenda may very definitely appeal to members of the GOP and provide areas of compromise for Obama and Republicans.

But they will still need some Democrats to go along with that agenda.

And let us remember that House Dems just got slaughtered in the midterms and a lot of the Blue Dog Dems who would have been open to that kind of agenda are gone.

Many of the Dems who are left are of the more traditionally Democratic variety and may very well be open to AFT and NEA pressure to stop Obama from rolling the public education system any further in the direction of privatization than he already has.

In other words, Obama can be fought on this.

The unions, of course, have to stop letting Obama and Duncan frame these issues and push back HARD against the pro-charter, pro-testing nonsense the administration is pushing.

If they can do this, Dems in the House and Nancy Pelosi in particular, may become very big allies in the war against Obama's NCLB Jr. policies.

Dems know the White House hung them out to dry on many issues, making them take difficult votes on cap-and-trade and other issues that put many House members at risk in the midterms.

Many House members are going to look to stick it to Obama now that the midterms are over and the White House is already starting to look toward 2012. As Politico put it today:

Pelosi in particular may now be more of an obstacle than the “outstanding partner” Obama dubbed her on Friday. Her supporters in Congress want her to stand up to the president to protect the liberal causes they worry he’ll forsake in the interest of getting re-elected.

It is time to start working on our congresspeople to push back against the pro-privatization, pro-charter, pro-testing agenda that both Obama and Duncan are pushing and the demonization of teachers that Obama engages in periodically.

House members will be open to this and they will listen.

After all, the White House is already signaling through Axelrod's jumping in the spring to work on the 2012 campaign and through it's promises of compromises with the GOP that it is every man and woman for himself/herself now.

Let us remind our House members just who it is who can get out the vote in 2012 and just who it was who didn't work all that hard in 2010 - union members and teachers.