washingtonpost.com - Live Online: "St. Louis, Mo.: How does Bush plan to help teenagers raise their grades and education? Or is he just saying this?
Robert G. Kaiser: He wants to extend the accountability provisions of the 'No Child Left Behind' law from elementary school to high school. This would mean that local school systems would face specific penalties if they fail to show steady improvement in test results of their students, among other things.
Washington, D.C.: Anything he said strike you as objectively untrue?
Robert G. Kaiser: Yes. Bush often describes a world whose features are all highly debatable, if not simply invented. He proposes “a comprehensive health care agenda” that will leave perhaps 50 million Americans without health insurance. Is that comprehensive in any meaningful sense? He promises big economic benefits from legal changes, “tort reform,” that independent economists say cannot have more than a small economic effect even if enacted, which is not likely. He promises to increase the size of Pell Grants, not noting that they have shrunk far below the level he promised when he came into the White House. He proposes to reduce American dependency on foreign supplies of energy, when independent specialists say that as long as we need oil, we will be heavily, and increasingly, dependent on foreign suppliers. Bush spoke of a free and sovereign Iraq as though all was well there, but Iraq is a country in terrible straits, with most uncertain prospects. Bush didn't invent the rosy scenario approach to politics, of course. There's a lot of tradition behind this kind of wishful rhetoric."
Robert G. Kaiser: He wants to extend the accountability provisions of the 'No Child Left Behind' law from elementary school to high school. This would mean that local school systems would face specific penalties if they fail to show steady improvement in test results of their students, among other things.
Washington, D.C.: Anything he said strike you as objectively untrue?
Robert G. Kaiser: Yes. Bush often describes a world whose features are all highly debatable, if not simply invented. He proposes “a comprehensive health care agenda” that will leave perhaps 50 million Americans without health insurance. Is that comprehensive in any meaningful sense? He promises big economic benefits from legal changes, “tort reform,” that independent economists say cannot have more than a small economic effect even if enacted, which is not likely. He promises to increase the size of Pell Grants, not noting that they have shrunk far below the level he promised when he came into the White House. He proposes to reduce American dependency on foreign supplies of energy, when independent specialists say that as long as we need oil, we will be heavily, and increasingly, dependent on foreign suppliers. Bush spoke of a free and sovereign Iraq as though all was well there, but Iraq is a country in terrible straits, with most uncertain prospects. Bush didn't invent the rosy scenario approach to politics, of course. There's a lot of tradition behind this kind of wishful rhetoric."
