Doing The Job of the MSM for them. Go and
read the whole thing. Here are some excerpts.
What impresses is his grasp of the central issues - and responsibilities - facing a U.S. senator. He doesn't claim he'll exercise more power than we know he'd really have if elected, but he recognizes the crucial role he could play on urgent questions like budget constraint, real education reform and putting a halt to the strangulation of the American economy and its underlying freedoms by unelected bureaucratic rule-making.
What's more, he has a personal passion to drive him - something which many conservative candidates, if they do possess it, attempt to hide. I'm not talking about "social conservative" issues here, either - in fact, running through our conversation in my mind on the way back to the sprawling Miller Estate, I realized I somehow never really touched on the "push-button" social issues which are said to "energize the base." It wasn't so much the "message discipline" of Pierce, but what come across as sincerity on the items he believes are important.
If he's serious about making an impact on the issues close to his heart, he will - whether he gets the GOP nod for senate or not.
2. Conservatism is compassionate without having to parade it - and without having to transform into liberalism in disguise. I've known this truth for ages, of course, but it's nice to see a candidate who gets it without becoming defensive. As a teacher, Pierce has seen the trials of schools, and particularly inner city schools, first-hand. He is fundamentally opposed to federal interference in education not because of budget worries or even so much federalism issues (although both of these points were mentioned). Rather, he sees a generation of young people, mostly black and underprivileged, being lost because of bad policies that don't address the fundamental problems of family structure, parental responsibility, classroom authority for the teacher and recognition of the importance of relationships between teachers and students.
Conservatives are generally leery of talking about these crucial factors, but not Pierce. He condemns No Child Left Behind as a bureaucratically-driven imposition of the feds on local and state authority which is failing students by creating artificial benchmarks, encouraging "teaching the tests" rather than teaching to think, treating individual students like numbers and holding only teachers responsible for results without providing them the authority or backup to mold classrooms to the benefit of students.
Here's a kick in the gut Pierce gave me, and I'm passing on to your stomach:
At 5th grade (age 10), 70 percent of African-American boys can look forward to one of the following by 18: Drug addiction, alcoholism, incarceration, AIDS or death.
How can we possibly remain a united, free and egalitarian society when we are allowing the destruction of an entire generation on our watch?
Bill Pierce not only gets this, he feels it. With his calm but unmistakable passion, he made me feel it.
