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Off the Record, Bush Wonders if She's Like Ike
AFL-CIO Mobilizes Effort To Elect Democrats
President Bush, shown with Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2001, recently expressed admiration for her presidential campaign, leading some journalists to infer that he thinks she will win the election in 2008. Bush also likened himself to former president Harry S. Truman, whose successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, followed Truman's foreign policy.
(By Eric Draper -- The White House Via Associated Press)
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Looking past the battle for the Democratic nomination, the AFL-CIO announced plans yesterday for the biggest campaign mobilization of union workers in its history, committing $53 million to an effort aimed at electing a Democratic president and expanding Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
"Our members are building an army to make more calls, knock on more doors and turn out more voters than ever," Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. "We're going for the trifecta: the House, the Senate and the White House."
In addition to its focus on the White House, the union federation will target 23 priority states, including traditional presidential battlegrounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
By concentrating on districts with heavy concentrations of union workers and families, the AFL-CIO effort aims to enlarge the Democrats' Senate majority by three to six seats, while hoping to increase the party's House majority by five seats.
-- Dan Balz
FOCUS ON TEACHERS
Edwards's Education Plan Takes Emphasis off Testing
Unveiling his national education policy in Des Moines, former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) said the No Child Left Behind law "has lost all credibility with the teachers and principals we need to make it work."
But Edwards, like most of the Democratic candidates, proposed only modest changes to it, such as improving the yearly tests that states give to students and shifting the way schools are measured to reduce the number that are labeled "failing" by the federal government.
Edwards would keep sanctions on schools where most students are failing but would limit sanctions for schools where only small groups of students are not doing well.
The biggest emphasis from Edwards was not on testing but on improving conditions for teachers. "Teachers, not tests, are the single most important factor in successful schools," Edwards said. But unlike Sen. Barack Obama, who has risked the ire of teachers by calling for increasing teacher pay based on how their students do on tests and in other measures, Edwards proposed giving every teacher in low-poverty schools that do well on tests $5,000 in bonus pay.
-- Perry Bacon Jr.
