No Mention Left Unmade

You may have noticed the absence of a notes transcript from the third and final presidential debate. Sorry to disappoint, but I just couldn’t be arsed to do it. Face it, this debate was boring. My network connection was faking seizures (which, by the way, you might be surprised to hear was an incredibly common practice among patients I saw during my time as an EMT. Well, that, and me getting halfheartedly punched by patients. Good times.) so I gave up on keeping up with Kit’s comments. Looking back over them this morning (admittedly, during Property—sorry Ellen Katz, it has nothing to do with my undying affection for you) I see that she was actually pretty evenhanded, sparing no expense to lambaste Bush for his incessant and bizarre mentions of the phrase “liberal senator from Massachusetts.”

So no transcript, but a thought or two here nonetheless.

If I get really bored this weekend, I’ll spin through the whole transcript of the debate and nail down exactly how many times Bush invoked the Power of No Child Left Behind. Which…weird. My brow folds into three distinct furrows on this one.

Furrow, the first: I feel like there was one, maybe two of the dozen or so times her used this that were actually on-point. As for the rest—I don’t know. Was this the part of the talking points to which he gave the most attention in the limo on the way over? It seemed like there may have been an off-camera moment with a few staffers where one of them, riddled with fear that the previous hours of briefing may have been for naught, grabbed Bush’s sleeve and said something to the effect of “look, if you get in trouble, just go back to NCLB…it’s a homerun.” Bush, feeling suddenly at ease with the unexpected presence of a baseball analogy, spent the rest of the walk to the studio thinking about how he’d really like to take in some of the playoff games in person this year, and by god he’s the Friggin’ Commander in Chief, and as such should totally be able to order such a thing to happen.

Furrow, the second: NCLB is a bad piece of legislation. Though the general idea—that we should overhaul the education system such that it does a better job of yielding full classes of educated children—is good, the aims and intentions are far too broad to be accomplished in a single piece of legislation. Couple that with the clumsy and inappropriate ways it attempts to go about such sweeping change and, well…we’re all sitting with a watermelon on our laps and Bush just told us jumping up from the chair is a patriotic thing to do. It’s not—the watermelon will break. This initiative is under funded (more on that in Furrow, the third), requires a ridiculous amount of standardized testing, and holds schools unfairly accountable for the results of said testing.

But I’m not disappointed by NCLB, because I don’t think it was ever intended to be successful. Not really. I think it was a happy way to take one of the big issues on election-2000 voters’ minds and wrap it in a neat package, tie it with a prettily-named bow, and send it on into the world.

Furrow, the third: I have to believe that, at some point in the task of debriefing him, one of Bush’s staffers had the onerous task of suggesting he, ah, might…you know, might spend a leetle less time harping on NCLB for the rest of the campaign, given that it was wildly shortchanged on funds. I envy that staff member’s task in the same way that I envy methadone addicts. Still, it was an important job, because really. Kerry pounced all over that one, and rightly so…the funding shortfall is somewhere between $6-7B. In the Bush spectrum of Things We Like to Pay For and Things We Don’t, it seems child welfare—both basic and educational—doesn’t fare as well as, say, ethanol subsidies when it comes time to write the checks.

So…why bring up an ill-planned and under funded initiative at every turn? I suppose the reality for this administration is that domestic issues have gone to lunch at the shit-sandwich cafeteria while the war toils along, and in a format where the focus is declaredly domestic there aren’t a lot of options. He couldn’t very well have stood there and listed all the ways in which his office has let the American people down but gee, whiz, they have some ideas to do better next time—in addition to being a woefully weak speaking position, Bush has now twice reminded us (vociferously) that he hasn’t made any mistakes in all four years in office. Sigh.

Please, vote for Kerry next month. And if you’re in Michigan, vote no on Prop 2. And if you’re the guys who live across the street, stop bellowing “YEAH..”