Charlie Crist and Politics

I generally hate writing about political maneuvering and primary challenges and the like. I'm much more interested in the issues than in articles about why the Republican party needs to move to the left/move to the right/widen its tent/get rid of RINOs/appeal to minorities/rally the base/nominate Sarah Palin/get rid of Palin in order to be viable over the long run. To be honest, someone who went from living in Utah (Bush by 46% in 2004) to living at Yale (Obama by 75% in 2008) can't really claim to have a good sense of the mood of the country and of what voters really want out of the Republicans.

All that said, I truly despise Charlie Crist and really hope that he loses in Florida. I was more or less indifferent to the primary campaign between between him and Rubio until the middle of April. And then Crist vetoed Florida's education reform bill:

The governor's decision to veto the bill drew a stark line between his administration and the Republican establishment. It earned plaudits from teachers unions, which opposed the bill.

The legislation—one of the most sweeping of its kind in the nation—would have eliminated tenure for new teachers and required merit-pay plans linking salaries to student learning progress. Unions opposed the measure, saying it would make it harder for Florida to hire good teachers, and that it violated collective bargaining rights.

I have long believed that the American teachers unions are one of the biggest problems in education today. Quite simply, the teachers unions exist not to advance the interests of students or even of all potential teachers, but rather the interests of members of the teachers union. The tenure and seniority based system of compensation that they advocate rewards mediocrity. The most talented individuals will always have offers from professions where they'll be paid in accordance with their abilities and their talent. Some of these remarkable human beings will take the pay cut and become a teacher because they enjoy teaching and feel that it's a worthwhile way to spend their lives. Personally, I have had the good fortune to be the student of many such teachers. But unfortunately, a career where seniority trumps competence is just not that appealing to potential teachers. Far too many of the college graduates who go into teaching are those who don't have other options. If you're not particularly good at what you do, a profession where you're virtually guaranteed steady pay raises and tenure for life is pretty nice. When the teachers unions complain loudly about how switching to merit pay will make teaching into a less appealing profession, my thought is that it makes it less appealing to the teachers who are the least effective, ie, precisely the group of teachers we need to get rid of to improve our education system. Merit pay is not a silver bullet, but it's hard to deny that merit pay will attract better teachers than the current system.

Crist, of course, knows that as well as anyone, which explains why he had originally supported this bill. By the time it passed the Florida legislature, though, it had become apparent that he was going to need to drop out of the Republican senate primary and run as an independent in the fall. His decision to veto it was an absolutely disgusting bit of political maneuvering, which is why former Senator Connie Mack resigned as the chairman of Crist's campaign in protest. It's one thing for the teachers unions to oppose this bill in their own interest. It's an entirely different thing for Crist to veto it at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Florida students because he thinks its in his own personal interest. I hope that Crist is humiliated in the November election and never again wins an election for anything.