Liberal professor Dave Brat’s campaign has been quite a circus, and he has been the tightrope act. After years as a liberal academic elitist, he now switches feet to try to attack Eric Cantor from the right. Problem is that his previous leftward tilts would have us spectators hoping he was doing this with a net.
This weekend, I took the chance to read some of the things Professor Brat believes, or at least believed before switching from his Ivory Tower milk to Virginia Tea.
If Professor Brat was a Congressman, the Tea Party would be challenging him in a primary right now based on what Brat has written in his “former identity.”
Professor Brat: “it is my personal belief that NCLB (No Child Left Behind) is a good idea for this nation. “
Candidate Brat: “I oppose top down approaches by the Federal Government such as Common Core and No Child Left Behind.”
Huh? Which Brat are you today? Left or Right? Flip a coin.
It gets better. Look how Professor Brat opposes testing like Virginia’s SOLs and thinks that more government spending will keep people from breaking the law
Professor Brat: “Perhaps too much weight is placed on test scores.”
Professor Brat: “ ‘the state spent approximately $16 per middle- and high-school student on dropout prevention, while spending $79,000 per young person incarcerated in juvenile prison.’ Something is certainly wrong with this picture. “
These are all from the same paper that Professor Brat authored some years back, before he discovered that there was a Tea Party and he wanted to be a politician.
How about this one! Professor Brat accuses teachers of being unknowingly racist and recommends mandatory government racial sensitivity training. Didn’t see that in the Republican Creed, did you?
Professor Brat :“ ‘The consistent finding from this literature is that teachers take Black students less seriously than they do Whites (Ferguson, 1998).’ … I’m sure that many teachers probably don’t even realize that they hold different expectations of students with different types of names. It’s not necessarily a problem that can’t be combated, though. A required teaching seminar dealing specifically with this issue could help…”
And I didn’t even mention the part where Professor Brat says that the “redistribution of wealth” is one of the only ways to improve education among the less-afluent. Justin Higgins covers that well, but one additional point struck me.
Professor Brat says, “Short of economic growth and redistribution of wealth, it seems that there is little that can be done to help less affluent children.” (Bold added for emphasis)
Notice Professor Brat says AND. Not OR. In Professor Brat’s world, economic growth and redistribution of wealth are joined. If Brat simply thought that one or the other would be good, growth or redistribution, he would have said so. But he said “and”. His only solution for helping less affluent children learn is to have economic growth AND redistribute it.
Now as a candidate, Brat has flipped from Obama-like wealth redistribution to a sudden convert to free market capitalism. Which was heads and which was tails, Two-Face?
As much as he’s tried to deny his liberal college professor background, Dave Brat’s own words demonstrate that his views don’t measure up with conservative principles. When Professor Brat is not on the campaign trail, telling Tea Partiers what they want to hear, he’s as politically correct as all the other liberal college professors in the safe haven of academia.
The Tea Party should be tossing Professor Brat out on his ear.
Read Professor Brat’s liberal paper here.
