OPINION:
Betsy DeVos was what bomber pilots call “a target of opportunity,” selected not from a carefully compiled list of strategic targets, but a target that a pilot with a few bombs left over from the day’s work is free to drop if he sees something inviting. Chuck Schumer, comfortable in his safe place, knew he had to blow up somebody. His friends on the left were thirsty for scalps and blood.
Sen. Schumer missed the target again. Mrs. DeVos survived, and was promptly sworn in as the secretary of Education. Mr. Schumer, the leader of the Democratic minority, continues to make an ass of himself with a scorched-earth strategy that threatens to make the Democrats a minority party for years to come.
Mr. Schumer gave the Democrats what they regard as a moral victory by forcing the Republicans to confirm her only by a tie-breaking vote by the vice president. This enabled them to put a polish on their piety, but other Democrats think this is a strategy that leads only to an unforgiving wilderness. Moral victories don’t count in politics. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, prescribes “a chill pill” for the moral winners in his party because he thinks they will be losers for a good while longer, contrary to their hopes for revenge in the midterm congressional elections two years hence.
“It ain’t gonna happen in 2018,” he told an audience at Stanford University this week. “Take a chill pill, man. You gotta be in this for the long haul … I don’t go for moral victory speeches. I can’t stand them. I’ve never lost an election. It’s about winning, because if you win you then have the power to go do what has to get done.”
The Democrats, desperate to do what they imagine has to be done, revealed themselves in the DeVos confirmation hearings as willing to betray friends in pursuit of a moral victory. No one illustrated how to do this like Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. He discovered in the DeVos hearings that he’s against school choice after promoting it with Mrs. DeVos for years as the mayor of Newark. It was his eloquence in promoting schools that actually educate children that propelled him to the Senate.
He saw in Newark what happens when the teachers unions are free to ruin a school system. The state of New Jersey took over the public schools two decades ago and published a 1,700-page summary of why — gross malpractice, questionable (to say the least) expenditures, collapsing facilities and dreadful student performance, a tale of corruption, chicanery and mismanagement.
It was enough to drive a mayor to want to do something about it. Mr. Booker looked at the ruins of the public schools and prescribed the cure he said was necessary — the very school choice that he and other Democrats argued that Betsy DeVos disqualified herself with similar advocacy.
“I am going to fight for the freedom and the liberty and the choice and the options of my people,” Mr. Booker told the American Federation for Children. He delivered similar remarks to a policy seminar of the Federation for Children as recently as last year. This is the Federation founded by Mrs. DeVos, and she was its chairman at the time. But that was then, and now Mr. Booker feels he must court the teachers unions in anticipation of making a run for the White House in 2020.
Hard times make a monkey eat red pepper, as a wise man once said, and foolish consistency, as the Democrats have demonstrated over and over in the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, leads to those hard times. Chuck Schumer’s strategy of destruction at any price hasn’t worked yet. Betsy DeVos lives, and she’s the new secretary of Education. There’s a lesson there for someone willing to take it.
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