say uncle

Clarifying the difference between “triangulation” and “bridge-building,” Mickey Kaus makes an important point about “bipartisan” politics and policy—namely, that there is nothing bipartisan about certain policy changes: they only come about when one side loses:

The Triangulator knows that bipartisan solutions don’t always require each side to give up its least important demands and meet in the middle, half-a-loaf style. Bipartisan solutions sometimes require one side or the other to give up it’s most important demand. There was nothing the left cared more about in the welfare debate, for example, than preventing states from being able to abolish welfare or rigorously require single mothers to work. In the bipartisan reform that ultimately passed in 1996, the left lost those demands.

Similarly, in the education debate, traditional due process protection against dismissal isn’t a marginal demand for the Dem-supporting teacher’s unions. It’s their core demand–not the last 10%, but the first 10%.

Yep, politics is blood sport, and there are winners and losers. To win, you must pound, batter, and stomp all over your opponent.

[[ Again: I'm not a politico, as I've said many times, but it would be impossible to ignore politics in this climate, and of course I do have an opinion:  Obama will emerge bloody, battered, and very badly beaten from this contest with the Clintons---and, yes, he's up against both of them. If he doesn't like that, by the way, he should make it an issue, take them head-on. But he is way too invested in being seen as above-it-all and morally superior. That's why he will lose. We may love him for appealing to the better angels in our nature, but this historical moment calls for us to gird our loins for battle, and to do battle. ]]

But back to Kaus. As if to make his point, I read in the New York Sun that the Bloomberg administration just emerged victorious from a battle with the powerful NYC teachers’ union:

Marshalling harsher words than she has used in months, the president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, is lashing out against the city, decrying a project to crack down on bad teachers.

The Bloomberg administration’s $1 million initiative aims to help principals either improve or fire unsatisfactory teachers. Principals judged nearly 1,000 tenured teachers unsatisfactory last year, but only 10 were removed from the system. During contract negotiations last year, Ms. Weingarten signed onto part of the plan, a program for teachers to help other teachers improve.

Ms. Weingarten said another part of the plan — for a new team of attorneys the city is billing the Teacher Performance Unit, which will help principals build cases against tenured teachers they believe are incompetent — shocked her when she read its details Wednesday night. “What they said to me about what this unit was and what was in this memo was the difference between night and day,” she said.

Ms. Weingarten called the team a “teacher gotcha unit.”

The New York Times covers this story rather differently:

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor to apologize to the city’s 80,000 teachers yesterday, a day after the chancellor sent principals an e-mail message announcing the formation of teams of lawyers and consultants meant to help principals remove poorly performing tenured teachers. Ms. Weingarten said that the message seemed timed to the release yesterday of national reading and math test scores showing little progress among New York City students. “The first speck of bad news, all of the sudden they go after teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. The mayor said yesterday that removing tenured teachers was “a last alternative.”

The patronage system that is the teachers’ union must lose before anything changes for the better in a school system that has made it impossible to fire bad teachers.

Bloomberg, a Democrat in Republican clothing, is the First Triangulator of New York City.