Common Core Conservative Re-Tread? Smart Oklahomans Won't Buy It!

WOW! Welcome to the New Year in Oklahoma, where we find the liberal Oklahoma news media ringing in their year with a tired and somewhat expected re-tread of 'Common Core as pillar of Conservative doctrine' by reproducing a blog from a former Mitt Romney spokesman, "Common Core popular in many quarters" by the Daily Oklahoman!

Goodness! Does this article coincide with the Governor Fallin-appointed Steering Committee's commencement into the re-write of Oklahoma's educational standards, ostensibly away from Common Core? Well, interestingly, yes, yes it does. Has the calendar changed over to a new year, signifying that Oklahomans will now forget the happenings of last year - including the REPEAL of Common Core - as easily as they have forgotten the color socks they wore last Tuesday?

Sadly, I imagine this thought to be the reason the Common Core indoctrination/re-education machine has begun to spin again. 

Here, former "conservative" presidential candidate Mitt Romney's former spokesman, Shawn McCoy, articulates a theme only summarized by the statement, "Conservative friends, if  “fellow Conservatives" like Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and John Kasich LOVE Common Core, then YOU should too!" 

Yes, McCoy isn't shy in his assertions; he comes right out and says he knows for a fact Common Core is loved by all "Conservatives" because it has NOT been an election issue. McCoy tells us, "…election results nationwide have proven Common Core's popularity". To back this theory up, we’re told that 'fellow' "Conservative", John Kasich, supports Common Core and he won his state's gubernatorial election by a landslide. He "even received 26 percent of the black vote". WHAT?

This statement makes my eyeballs bleed. At what point do you consider an essentially unchallenged election as a scored point for Common Core? Please note the very first line in this article from Human Events,

Ohio Gov. John Kasich trounced a disastrous Democrat for his November re-election win, but in 23 of 88 counties Kasich received fewer votes than he got in 2010.

Later in the article, we’re given even more information about this less-than-stellar win for Governor Kasich

An Oct. 1 Quinnipiac University poll found 25 percent of likely Democratic voters planned to pick Kasich over FitzGerald. Election results suggest Kasich won tens of thousands of Democrats who would have supported a credible Democrat challenger. Every down-ticket Democrat running for a statewide executive office received more votes than FitzGerald in almost every county.

So, honestly, the Democratic challenger was SO bad that “Fox News exit polling indicated 26 percent of self-identified liberals and 25 percent of Democrats voted for Kasich” and we’re to believe that Kasich won reelection not only because Common Core didn’t matter, but because it’s popular with “Conservatives”, leading to the unspoken thesis that all “Conservatives” support Common Core?

Man, I haven’t had a ton of logic in my studies, but I can assure you THIS notion amounts to a zero sum logic game.

While there’s no great exit polling on this race like Kasich’s, it might be instructive to look at “Conservative” Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin’s reelection bid.

In 2010, Mary Fallin ran for Governor against Democrat Jari Askins. Fallin received 625,506 votes (60.45%) against Askins - a strong Democratic candidate who left the post of Lt. Governor for her gubernatorial run.

In 2014, Fallin received 460,298 votes (55.8%) against an outgoing state Representative, Joe Dorman (338,239/41%), whose campaign began after a late announcement.

During her first term, Governor Fallin served as the Chairman for the National Governor’s Association – one of the progenitors of the Common Core – and made all of President Obama’s NCLB education ‘reforms’ the center of her education ‘reform’ initiatives. Why, would Governor Fallin lose 26% of the vote for her second term, if Common Core didn’t matter and conservatives supported this and other education ‘reform’ efforts?

Then there’s the case of former Oklahoma State Superintendent Janet Barresi, a Jeb Bush Foundation for Excellence in Education, Chief For Change, who supported all Governor Fallin’s initiatives. She lost her bid for reelection in the primary election where she came in third out of three, below a candidate that didn’t even mount a campaign.

I ascribe most of McCoy’s faulty logic to the idea that Romney, Kasich, Jeb Bush and Fallin are conservative. In fact, back in 2013, as former “Conservative” Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee came out in the Common Core camp, I wrote a blog about conservativism and what it means to be a conservative (I refer to the unrepresentative label as “Conservative”, I refer to the actual philosophy in lower case without quotes). I went on to contend that because Common Core is antithetical to the definition of Conservativism, there is no way conservatives can support Common Core.  

I know as long as Common Core lives ANYWHERE in the nation and as long as voters are not well enough educated on the principle of conservatism to understand they’re being played, this argument will arise again and again. We simply must educate others about what it means to be conservative if we’re to prevent Oklahoma from producing a Common Core re-tread that real conservatives don’t want and the state doesn’t need.