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THE JACKSON HERALD
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010
Named the best weekly editorial page in the nation for 2007, 2008
Opinions
“Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ”
- Henry Ward Beecher ~
Mike Buffington, editor • Email: Mike@mainstreetnews.com
our views
Should illegals
be booted
from colleges?
G OP candidates for gov
ernor are making a lot
of noise about “weeding”
out higher education students from
Georgia’s colleges who are illegal
aliens.
Much of this issue is in response to
a recent news story about an illegal
alien student at Kennesaw College
who for a time, was detained and
threatened with deportation follow
ing a minor traffic offense on that
campus.
It was apparently news to many
that students without legal status
were being admitted to the state’s
colleges.
But the issue isn’t as black-and-
white as it may first appear. While
non-legal residents shouldn’t get
special benefits, they also shouldn’t
be unduly thwarted from getting an
education.
In most of these cases (of which
there is considerable debate on
the total number of such students),
illegal alien college students were
brought across the border by their
parents as children. They have
attended our secondary schools
and now want to continue their
education at the college level.
It’s not the fault of the children
that they are not legal residents;
that was their parents’ doing.
Should they be denied access to
college because of their immigra
tion status?
This is made more complex
because of two other factors. First,
many American colleges, includ
ing Georgia’s, seek out qualified
foreign students every year. At the
graduate level, some degrees are
dominated by foreign students, in
part because of a lack of qualified
American-born students to fill those
slots. American high schools do
not produce enough domestic stu
dents to fulfill all of our economic
needs, especially in the sciences.
Second, while illegal alien stu
dents do take some college slots,
there’s often a dearth of native-
born, qualified students. Americans
are born into opportunity, yet many
never take advantage of what they
have. Should those students who
are qualified and who do seek to
take advantage of this opportunity
be denied access simply because
of their immigration status? Would it
not be better in the long run to have
a higher-educated population, even
if some of those people are illegal?
This is a difficult issue, one cer
tain to get a lot of talk this summer
as the governor’s campaigns heat
up.
But separating the political heat
from the practical reality may be
difficult.
The Jackson Herald
Founded 1875 • The Official Legal
Organ of Jackson County, Ga.
Mike Buffington Co-Publisher & Editor
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News Department
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Jana Adams Mitcham Features Editor
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"Looks like the 9 th District race is fast becoming a marathon!"
"Requiring seatbelts for pickup trucks sure improves road
safety... I think I'll text the Governor and tell him so!"
Can Barnes or Oxendine be stopped?
JOHN Oxendine and Roy Barnes
have been consistent leaders in their
respective primaries in the race for
governor. With the July 20 primary
only six weeks away, can they keep
their leads and secure the nomina
tions?
Barnes is the easy call right now in
the Democratic primary. The former
governor has maintained a strong
lead in all the early polls, even if not
so far ahead that he might win it on
July 20. He also has been able to
raise more money than any other
candidate, Democratic or Republican.
There was one recent poll that claimed
Barnes had the support of 64 percent of likely
Democratic voters, but that does not sound
plausible. Most of the other polls have Barnes
a few points below 50 percent, and his key
supporters are careful to say they think he will
be pushed into a runoff election.
The other Democrats are experienced can
didates who have won many races in their
political careers: Attorney General Thurbert
Baker, veteran legislator DuBose Porter, and
retired adjutant general David Poythress. You
wonder why some of them did not run in other
statewide races where they would have had a
more realistic shot at winning.
On the Republican side, the race is a little
more competitive.
Oxendine hired some new consultants last
spring and has run a more disciplined cam
paign in recent weeks, avoiding public disputes
and acting like a frontrunner. The convention
al wisdom last year was that Oxendine would
“implode” at some point and his campaign
would collapse, but that hasn’t happened.
“He’s realized that this is a marathon, not a
sprint,” said a campaign consultant.
One issue hanging over the Oxendine cam
paign is the $120,000 that a few insurance
companies sent to him last year through a
series of political action committees based
in Alabama. The State Ethics Commission
scheduled a June 24 hearing on those dis
puted contributions, which is less than four
weeks before election day. If the hearing is
not postponed, it may do some damage to the
Oxendine campaign and provide a boost for
his competitors.
Former congressman Nathan Deal has sur
vived unfavorable publicity and a House eth
ics committee scolding over an auto salvage
business he owns that did business for years
with the state. While he still trails
Oxendine among Republican voters,
a recent poll showed Deal running
slightly better against Barnes in a
general election matchup than any
of the other GOP contenders.
Former secretary of state Karen
Handel runs neck-and-neck with
Deal in the fight for second place
and a spot in the GOP runoff, but
she still has had her problems with
fundraising.
Handel was in the news over the
past week because of a disagreement
with Georgia Right to Life, the state’s leading
anti-abortion organization. Her more moder
ate position on abortion could help Handel
in a general election campaign against the
Democratic nominee, but it could cause her
problems among the more conservative voters
who dominate the Republican primary.
Former state senator Eric Johnson has raised
more money in this primary than anybody but
Oxendine and is considered by some to be the
toughest opponent the Republicans could field
against Roy Barnes. I’ve heard variations of
this statement from several political observers:
“Barnes maybe can beat Oxendine or Handel,
but he couldn’t beat Johnson.”
Johnson’s problem is that he still can’t break
out of the single digits in the early polls of
likely Republican voters.
With such a crowded Republican primary
field - there are seven candidates in all - you
would expect them to have started attacking
each other with negative TV ads by now, but
that has not been the case.
Money is scarce in this recession year and
candidates are having to hold back on their
barrage of TV commercials until election
day gets closer. You can look for hard-hitting
attack ads to start airing in the final two weeks
before July 20.
There also appear to be a lot of Republican
voters who simply haven’t made up their minds
yet - as many as one-third of those polled in
recent surveys are still in the undecided column.
Barnes and Oxendine, for now, remain the
frontrunners in their primaries. If somebody
hopes to knock either of them off, there isn’t
much time left.
Tom Crawford is the editor of The Georgia
Report, an Internet news service at www.
gareport.com that covers government and
politics in Georgia. He can be reached at
tcrawford@capitolimpact.net.
Pendulum swinging
back on history texts
T HE material in school history text
books has long been controversial.
Liberals think it’s too conservative;
conservatives think it’s too liberal.
It’s an interesting — and important — debate.
How history is presented to children is usually
how they will perceive history for the rest of
their lives.
The problem is,
history isn’t just
facts, it’s also an
interpretation of
facts. And depend
ing on who’s doing
the interpreting,
the portrait of the
past is shaded dif
ferently.
That the nexus
of a recent Texas
debate where
conservative state
school board
members pushed
through a variety
of changes to the state’s school history cur
riculum. Those changes have come under fire
from liberals and some teachers who say they
distort American history.
The truth is, history is always being distorted.
The victor in any conflict gets to write the text
book and that’s the version which gets told.
For the last 30 to 40 years, history textbooks
have been gradually moving to the political
Left in their interpretation of events. That was
a reaction to the idea that history texts focused
too much on the “big names” in history and
didn’t focus enough on what the “common
man” contributed to the historical record. In
addition, the Civil Rights and feminist move
ments of the 1960s influenced historians to
include more emphasis on how blacks and
women influenced history, making the point
that history wasn’t just about “dead European
white men.”
Fair enough. The textbooks of my youth
probably did have too much fawning over a
handful of Founding Fathers who were por
trayed more as demigods than as the real flesh-
and-blood men they were. And they did gloss
over some of the more controversial aspects in
American history, such as the Indian removals
and Civil Rights issues.
But as with many political movements, the
effort to bring more depth to the historical
record has perhaps swung the pendulum too
far to the Left in some textbooks. Often very
minor players whose role in history was insig
nificant get elevated in textbook writing, mostly
in an obvious effort to be more politically
correct and multi-cultural. Some of the true
leaders of history sometimes get down-played
and evaluated through today’s lens rather than
the view of their own times. (Thomas Jefferson
was a slave owner, a fact that gets mentioned
in may textbooks as judged from today’s view
and not the view of his own era.)
A lot of this isn’t stated in textbooks directly;
it’s often subtle with the choice of photos and
in how much space is devoted to various kinds
of topics.
The Texas move in May was a reac
tion to this. In votes split along party lines,
Republicans put in new teaching requirement
for Texas students (and by extension Texas
textbooks) that swing back toward a more
nationalistic view of America.
The problem is that in attempting to correct
some of the bias that the Left has injected into
history textbooks, Texas Republicans have
inserted their own political biases. Perhaps
the most controversial of those are to question
the role of religion in American history in a
way that promotes the idea that America is a
“Christian” nation.
Some of the changes adopted may be con
troversial, but depending on the age of the
student, a valid point of historical discussion.
Older students should be challenged to think
critically and to question assumptions.
Younger students, however, should not be
subject to political indoctrination from either
the Left or the Right. They lack the maturity to
think critically about some of the more difficult
issues.
Whatever the direction the Texas changes
take (and there’s some indication of a build
ing backlash), this isn’t the end of the story.
Historians, parents and educators will always
debate what is historically important and both
the Left and the Right will wrestle to see who
can have the most influence in education his
tory.
The Left has dominated that sphere for three
decades. That the political Right now has con
trol isn’t the end of the world, even if they, too,
are bias in their view of our nation’s history.
Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson
Herald. He can be reached at mike@main-
streetnews.com.
mike
buffington