An old American sage named Will Rogers and I have something in common
- we only know what we read in the papers. And many of the people of New
Hampshire, I suspect, share this unfortunate handicap on our ability to
make sense of the doings of our state.
Now, don't get me wrong. The newspapers do a fair job of telling the stories
of the day, better anyway than that square-eyed cyclops that sits in every
Granite State family room. But as a writer and an editor I am aware of just
how narrow a crack of light can be cast on a complex subject by a story
in a daily paper. And anyone who has walked through the dark with a flashlight
can tell you the same shaft of light can make a tree branch look like a
beckoning temptress or a slathering ghoul, depending upon the angle.
When you've made up your mind about an issue like gun control or abortion
it makes it easier to see the angle of bias in any media report. Frankly,
I usually define reporter bias as the number of degrees away from my own
views that the reporter seems to stray. I find education issues to be simple
to read on my bias meter. Certain concepts define the calm center of the
issue for me: support local control, don't throw taxpayers' money at every
problem, hold teachers and students accountable for their performance in
the classroom, leave "values clarification" to the parents. If
a reporter strays from these assumptions (as all too often they do) in my
mind they are sucked up by the twister of bias.
So why is it so hard for me to get a good bias reading on the subject of
federal Goals 2000 funds? It's not that I don't sense bias in the knee jerk
attitude that any federal money is good. It's just that the other side of
the argument doesn't seem grounded. It too seems to bounce about in the
ill winds of political rhetoric.
"Goals 2000 money has strings attached to it," reports our Governor.
Why am I not surprised? Does anyone with a mother believe that money ever
comes without strings? What about that $10 Aunt Lucy gave you for Christmas
when you were 9 years old? What? You still haven't written to thank her?
Unless we assume a purist attitude towards money filtered through the federal
government and refuse it all, the proper question for Goals 2000 money should
be, simply, "What strings? How intolerable are they when balanced by
the benefits of the funding?"
Reading the papers every morning has informed me that these Goals 2000 strings
are either as vaporous as strands of morning fog or as irrefutable as baling
wire. No one has cast much light for me on exactly where these strings attach
or what happens when they are pulled.
When the issue was being weighed on a state-wide level I could understand
the governor acting as judge of the cost-benefit ratio for the citizenry.
After all we the people mostly just read the papers, not the fine print,
and if the governor and his advisors say this is bad medicine for us who
are we to argue?
However the landscape shifted when the Goals 2000 funds were offered to
individual school districts. At this level, I assume, there are plenty of
fine-print-readers with the God-given right of local control and the best
interests of their students at heart. Why shouldn't they be able to decide
if they will apply for a grant from any legitimate source?
Union Leader columnist Richard Lessner tells us that this block grant money
is like heroin, the first samples are free but once you're hooked, you pay.
As much as I enjoy this analogy, I have to assume that this applies to any
federal largesse and it still doesn't detail the specific dangers of the
addiction. Governments big and small - and their subsidiaries such as school
districts - are addicted to money the way that people are addicted to air
and water. The supply is not an option, only the quantity and the source.
Conservatives support smokers rights and oppose seat belt laws. Therefore
why should they be concerned with what individual school districts do in
the privacy of their own bedroom communities?
Now, when the newspapers leave me befuddled I can always turn to my friends
in the conservative ranks to clarify things and give me a look behind the
scenes. However in doing so I've come to understand that this issue may
be the undoing of the gubernatorial campaign of the erstwhile conservative
leader of that race. Ovide Lamontagne has apparently not toed the ideological
line closely enough for many of the state's Republican guard. While not
encouraging individual school districts to seek Goals 2000 money (in fact
discouraging them) he did not lead a vote to prevent them from having the
choice.
As my personal conservative political analyst explains this to me, this
transgression will cause Ovide's base of support to be split with the more
virginal (but less electable) former GO-NH director Al Rubega. Apparently
many in the rank-and-file have already made the move to Rubega, or else,
sensing a train wreck up ahead, have simply made tracks for their Primary
night armchairs. This defection, I am told, will likely catapult the least-ideologically-pure-but-best-financed
Republican candidate Bill Zeliff into the fall campaign as the Republican
nominee. And, finally, Zeliff's relative inexperience with state politics
and his embarrassments in Washington may be sufficient to elect a pro-choice
Democrat to the governorship of the most Republican state of the union.
What am I missing here? Mr. Lamontagne appeared to be a pretty logical successor
to the Merrill, Gregg, and Sununu dynasties. He's obviously smart, conservative,
telegenic, well spoken, prolife. He's held the line on many issues as school
board chairman and has drawn plenty of fire from the liberal press. One
error and his ranks defect? Republican warriors need to study the battle
plans of their predecessors like Dwight Eisenhower and Atilla the Hun.
As my brain tissue has firmed up over the years I have followed Churchill's
law and gradually become more conservative, but I remember the lessons of
my youth. I try not to throw out a baby with its bathwater. I choose not
to cut off my nose to spite my face. And I remember the word to an old ditty:
"As through this life and times you roll, keep your eye on the donut,
not the hole."
I've come to the conclusion the Goals 2000 issue is like a donut hole. It's
a thing that is not defined by itself but by what surrounds it. So far,
in the papers I've read, no one has described just what the actual donut
is made of - information that I desire before I'm willing to sink my teeth
into it.
Rick Broussard is editor of New Hampshire Magazine.
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