Another politician using schoolchildren as campaign props

I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread political ideology. The idea that school children are forced to hear from a politician justifying his ideas is not only infuriating, but goes against the beliefs of most Americans, while bypassing parents through an invasive abuse of power.

That in a nutshell is what the Florida Republican Party chairman said a couple of weeks ago to stir up controversy over President Obama’s planned speech to American schoolchildren encouraging them to stay in school.

It doesn’t take much to turn the sentiment around on 25th District State Del. Steve Landes, who toured schools in the district on Wednesday ostensibly in connection with an effort initiated by the National Conference of State Legislators to get local legislators across the country into their local public schools, but of course Landes is running for re-election in November.

Where’s the outrage, I wondered when word first got to me about the tour, which was featured in a story in the Daily News-Record this morning (story link here). Because Landes actually is running for something, whereas Obama just got elected and won’t be on a ballot again for three years. So surely the well-intentioned people who had issue with Obama proselytizing politics to schoolchildren to the point where there was open discussion about pulling children from school that day and related actions would raise a similar stink about our embattled state delegate using area schoolchildren as a campaign prop.

I’m not naive. I didn’t expect a sliver of outrage from the partisans who obviously only raised issue with the Obama stay-in-school speech because it was Obama. And as far as Landes is concerned, he’s been using schoolkids as campaign props for years. I even followed him around several years ago on one of his area school tours.

Before allowing myself to get too outraged, I called the campaign of Landes’ Democratic opponent, Greg Marrow, to find out if they had any such visits on their itinerary the next few weeks. Campaign manager Dan Chavez told me the opportunity had been afforded the Marrow camp to make the visits into effective joint appearances, but the decision was made to decline the invites. “We didn’t want to be following Steve around all day,” said Chavez of the visits, which included South River Elementary School in Grottoes and Wilson Memorial High School in Fishersville.

I’d rather have heard from Chavez that the reason the Marrow campaign declined the chance to tag along was that it didn’t want to engage in the exploitation of schoolkids for political purposes that Landes makes regular practice, but the effect is the same.

If we were to give anybody an out on this, it would be President Obama, given that he’s not running for anything right now and his intent was to advance the stay-in-school message that is an important one to get out to high-school students in a day and age when 30 percent of our high-school freshmen aren’t graduating on time and 1.2 million kids a year are dropping out of school. But since we decided to have all this outrage about Obama telling kids to stay in school, it’s only fair to give equal hell to Landes.

At least if you want to say that Obama was setting up a photo op, he did a photo op that had something of substance to it with the stay-in-school push. The Landes photo op was devoid of anything substantive except that it got him some cheap publicity in a local right-leaning daily newspaper.

 

– Column by Chris Graham