| Teh Demas has a pretty good column about the misplaced priorities of the governor and state Legislature as it relates to education. It's been making the rounds on social media networks, leastways. What would be nice for me to know is how much of the criticism being aimed at the governor is really deserved, and how much of it is because there's a difference between the policies he should be pursuing and the policies he has any hope of seeing passed through the Legislature. When I see some of the noxious shit land on his desk, what I see is the same sort of thing that mired Jennifer Granholm into a neverending fight with Mike Bishop over everything ... the difference being that she'd have vetoed stuff and the Dems had control of the House. Anyway, on to the salient point, which is why state government won't do that one thing that everyone wants it to do, which is invest more in education. And, by the way, I don't mean the Mackinac Center's idiotic idea that appropriations for higher education represent a subsidy for higher education. I'm talking about supporting schools up and down the pipeline with proper resources. Part of your answer, I think, lies here. According to a working paper from two political scientists who interviewed 2,000 state legislative candidates last year, politicians all think Americans are more conservative than they actually are. Unsurprisingly, Republicans think voters are way more right-wing than they actually are.
This is the exact same phenomenon we saw last November. Republicans tend to think that voters are a lot more rightwing than they really are, because while they've done internal polling they don't believe it. Why would they? There was lots of polling before the election, and the polls done by rightwing outfits turned out to be hilariously wrong, but Republicans didn't really spend a lot of time wondering if they were poorly served by their own media outlets because other than Henry Payne's Museum for Half-Formed Thoughts being shuttered, nothing really happened. If you believe something and aren't prone to self reflection, then you'll continue to believe in that something even when information conflicts with it. |
