The Color of the Candidate's Spirit

 

Beware of false prophets,

which come to you in sheep's clothing,

but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit;

but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

— Matthew 7:15-17

             

            Former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts, an African-American conservative, once said that we are all alike on the inside, since nobody's spirit has a color, and in that way, all of us are just like God. I like that.

 

You can tell a leopard by its spots and a tiger by its stripes. But people? You've got to look past a lot of surface stuff to be able to capture the essence of someone's spirit. And it's important that we do. I think you can discern the character of a person - understand "the color of his spirit" -- based on what he or she says, writes and does, and who he or she associates with. So this election season, I've tried to understand the spirits of the two Presidential candidates, and have come up with this ironic truth:

 

The vanilla-skinned guy running for President would be much better than the chocolate-skinned guy for people of color and their children, which is highly ironic, as well as everybody else.

 

That's because the positions of the vanilla guy, John McCain, are much closer to God's in the bedrock issues of education, economics, national security, energy, health, and the defense of life and liberty.

 

My pick for John McCain over Barack Obama has nothing to do with skin color. It really doesn't.  And it's not just because I'm a staunch Christian, even though Obama has ridiculed the Bible and people of faith, said that America is no longer a Christian nation, is pro-abortion and pro-homosexual marriage, and for 20 years sat in the pews while his "Christian" pastor spewed hate, instead of teaching how to love others, as Jesus did.

 

It's not because I believe reliable leaders come from stable homes, although I do, and it must be pointed out that John McCain came from an intact family and his dad was a U.S. admiral, while Barack Obama's dad didn't marry his mom, they were of different races, and his late father abandoned Barack and his mother and went back to Kenya, where he was a polygamist, leaving Barack with an obvious "father hunger" that is unsettling and predictive of trouble to come.

 

I oppose him, too, not just because I'm totally pro-America, a fiscal conservative, fiercely supportive of the military, and law-abiding, though it is true that Obama would:

 

·         surrender in Iraq;

 

·         falsely said that our forces are "air-raiding villages" and killing civilians in Afghanistan;

 

·         would dignify and authenticate terrorists like Iran's Ahmadinejad, the Castros and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez by scheduling talks with them with no prior conditions;

 

·         has called for new spending that would total an estimated trillion new dollars;

 

·         wrote his college thesis on disarmament and has admitted doing drugs, including cocaine, but for mysterious reasons won't release his college records, medical records or even his original birth certificate;

 

·         is endorsed by the Israel-hating terrorist group Hamas;

 

·         has a cousin Raila Odinga who's a Muslim Marxist in Kenya working to make Sharia law the rule there even though the country is 80% Christian,

 

·         and has financial and social ties to anarchist terrorists like William C. Ayers, crooks like Tony Rezko, convicted thieves like Aiham Alsammarae, former PLO terrorists like Rashid Kalidi (the Obama friend who invited Iran's Ahmadinejad to Columbia University), and race-baiting hate hucksters like Jeremiah Wright.

 

But, you know, we can just ignore all of that; the mainstream media seems to be. But let's just look at the important issue of education. McCain's positions are a darn sight closer than Obama's to the principles set down in the Bible by our big School Superintendent in the Sky for how we are supposed to educate the next generation of citizens.

 

Obama has covered up his own academic track record, did next to nothing about education in the Illinois state legislature or so far in the U.S. Senate, and has shown no evidence of being able to bring together both sides of a debate in this or any other issue and come to a constructive consensus. I believe his end game is to nationalize our schools. You've heard of "socialized medicine"? He'd like to socialize schools, too.

 

McCain's way is pro-American. He is saying that education shouldn't cost as much as we're spending and we can cut it a lot without hurting the classroom, that most of the money should go to good teachers, and that what's taught should be what parents want taught, not what the bureaucrats and special-interest groups want taught.

 

McCain favors:

 

n       reforms that refocus schools on making children literate and numerate

 

n       several kinds of school choice

 

n       charter schools

 

n       online education

 

n       tutoring

 

n       more financial control for principals

 

n       paying teachers "battle pay" for taking jobs in our toughest-to-teach neighborhoods and tackling the toughest school subjects such as math and science that low-income kids really need to master

 

n       attracting more smart people to teaching careers in nontraditional paths, including midlife professionals and retired military

 

n       and putting parents in charge of education dollars instead of politicians fed by big educational bureaucracies.

 

(See www.JohnMcCain.com and search his "Education" policies)

 

Most of all, everything would be geared toward accurate measurements of actual student performance, too. That's the positive part of the No Child Left Behind federal education legislation that often gets left out by the left-wingers who hate it: accountability. Under President McCain, no money would be given to the things that don't work after a decent trial.

 

Those are the things that the evidence tells us will help disadvantaged kids close the achievement gap with the kids of the 'burbs. Those are the things that represent "change" from the status quo in K-12 education. Those are the things, then, that Obama SHOULD be for.

 

But he's not. He's for same old, same old, only costing more money:

 

n       Gutting the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind to make educators free to teach their highly politicized, nonsensical diversity, historical revisionism and self-esteem curricula instead of delivering academic subjects.

 

n       "Zero to Five," a federal government program directed at creating "free" government nurseries for children from the cradle to kindergarten. It's ostensibly to get them ready for school. But in reality it's "free day care," a carbon copy of what the Soviet Union did to get more women in the workforce. And you know what happened to their lifestyle, economy and workforce once they nationalized early-childhood over there.

 

n       Quadrupling funding for "Early Head Start," and increasing it for "Head Start," even though the research clearly shows that any and all benefits of the federal government's early childhood education program for disadvantaged kids completely disappear and wash out by the time the children are in third grade. It's a colossal waste of time, and a big reason needy kids are so bad at reading in inner-city grade schools. It's because Head Start is so busy socializing young children and making their parents feel dependent on government for services, it fails to give them the foundational skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.

 

n       Giving tax credits that would effectively give all students $4,000 "free" for college in exchange for 100 hours of volunteer labor. But it's never "free," is it? One more log on the taxpayer's already-overburdened back. And if everybody goes to college, what will happen to the quality of college curricula? It'll have to be dumbed down so that "no freshman will be left behind." More remedial costs to cover up the failures of the K-12 schools! And I can imagine what that "labor" will be like, based on Obama's ties with the Marxist-tinged ACORN "community service" organization, and the "Chicago Annenberg Challenge," Obama's gig with Weatherman bomber/terrorist William C. Ayers, which gave away nearly $50 million to socially radically groups supposedly to help inner-city Chicago schools, but even its own final report admits had "little impact" academically.

 

So they wasted $50 million which was supposed to help needy kids. Is THAT the spirit of leadership and accountability we want in the White House?

 

Just as sick as I am about the prospect of having this radical person in the White House, I am sick to death of minority students in this country doing so much worse than Caucasians in our K-12 education system. Incredibly, Obama would make things worse, not better, because he'd keep those same oppressive systems in place in our schools, propped up and expanded, and block innovation and, ironically, major change in education.

 

And oh, do we need change. I beg you to consider:

 

n       The dropout rate for minorities hovers at around 50%, while for whites, it's much closer to 0% most places.

 

n       I have a black friend who cringes twice a year, when the community's one "black" newspaper runs lots of names and photos of African-American kids who are "honor" students with a 3.5 GPA or better. He says, and I believe him, that only a relative handful of those "honor" students score a 20 or better on the ACT, which is the minimal score you need to get into the not-so-tough University of Nebraska. No wonder minority parents are crying "discrimination." No wonder they feel their kids are being aced out of the American dream.

 

n       We all cringe over reports that the average black high-school graduate in America has the approximate academic skills of the typical white seventh-grader. That just HAS to stop.

 

Obama is for throwing even more money down the socially-engineered rathole that has ruined the schools and, therefore, the career opportunities, for several generations in our inner cities.

 

McCain's vision, in contrast, would allow for charter schools that could operate free of the stultifying bureaucracy to the point where we could have outstanding, world-class inner-city high schools like the one named for black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar in Washington, D.C. It has sadly degraded into academic ruin by racial integration mandates and social engineering such as Obama would espouse.

 

McCain would empower more educators to follow the common-sense principles of the "No Excuses" schools, 21 low-income but high-achieving schools across the country with most minority students who blew the lid off test scores with cost-free and common-sense principles like McCain's. Their successes were detailed in a book you can buy online, used, for $3.72. I've owned No Excuses for years; it's obvious no one in the Obama camp has read it because they don't like people to know that we could be teaching lots better for lots less.

 

McCain would allow thousands of Marva Collins replications to spring up. She's the incredibly dedicated African-American teacher who opened a private school in her house for the poorest of the poor in Chicago for pennies per week in tuition. She gave them a solid curriculum with an emphasis on discipline, integrity and respect - and years later, darn near 100% of her graduates are employed, paying taxes and doing well. Meanwhile, vast numbers of kids who went to public school in Obama's Chicago for thousands of dollars per year plus the $50 million Annenberg Challenge and so forth, are now dead, in gangs, in prison, unemployed . . . and you'll notice that Marva Collins is one Chicago black woman who is NOT falling all over herself endorsing Obama.

 

There are lots of other African-American leaders who aren't, either. I stand with them.

 

We need change, all right. We need it badly.

 

And we'll get it by voting for McCain. Yes, we can! And we should. †