My Two Cents on Ann Coulter

This will be my last post on Ann Coulter, but I believe that the breadth and controversy of her talk merited a number of different posts. Given my disagreement with many of the answers she gave to the questions that were asked, I would like to elaborate on my own viewpoints to provide somewhat of a rebuttal to her statements.

I agree that it will be important for the Republicans to pick a strong Vice Presidential candidate, because McCain is really getting up there in age. I find her advice to pick Mitt Romney as a Vice Presidential candidate to be an admittedly wise choice in terms of electability for the Republicans, since the vote was mainly split between Romney and McCain until Romney dropped out of the race. Whether or not he will actually make a good Vice President if he comes into office is a topic for debate outside of this discussion, er, blog.

I found it interesting though that both one of the questioners and Coulter herself seemed to buy into this idea that there is some sort of Democrat takeover in the teaching profession that leads to this sort of brainwashing of kids when they are young, entrenching them with a very liberal, Democratic ideology. Maybe it’s not the fact that teachers are all liberals that makes students move more towards the left. In fact, one of my favorite and most influential teachers in high school was a strong conservative, yet I do not find myself assuming his own political views because of his inspiration as a teacher.

Instead, I think that it’s maybe that people who become teachers are too intelligent to buy into many of the ideas and policies that the Republican Party that simply hurt the working class and the lower class in this country. While many Republicans have made accomplishments for education and have fought for better quality schools, failed and inadequate programs such as No Child Left Behind try to put state and federal control over processes that are probably best managed at the local level. In fact, NCLB is ironic because it runs contrary to the Republican ideal of small government. However, in general, most teachers (as most normal citizens) probably see how education has taken the backseat to defense spending and other areas of the budget under George W. Bush. So it’s not a problem with a lack of conservatives in the profession, but rather it’s the ability of most teachers to understand what’s in the best interest of this country’s young people that causes them to have a liberal leaning on many issues.