The audience, mostly teachers representing states from all over the U.S., listened on as leading education reformers like Linda Darling-Hammond, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and professor Diane Ravitch and film star Matt Damon condemned the high-stakes testing they say are inimical to public education.

Teachers, students, and education reformers await a keynote speaker during the July 30 Save Our Schools March (Mikhail Zinshteyn)

Slam poets and union leaders told protesters to overwhelm the inboxes and landlines of policy makers; country music performers sang tongue-in-cheek tunes like “Test Teacher,” with many in attendance singing along to the lyrics: “Work on Math and English and forget about the rest,” and “get off the monkey bars and stay behind a desk.”

Another performer, George Mason professor Mary Stone Hanley, likened NCLB to snake oil while reciting her poem, “The Mess,” saying the maligned and decades-old education policy is “a simple answer to a complex question.”

George Mason professor Mary Stone Hanley shares her poem as a sign linguist translates during the July 30 Save Our Schools March

Policy specifics

Diane Ravitch, in an interview with The American Independent before she came on stage, said, “[policy makers] don’t understand what good education looks like. These congressmen went to great schools; if they want the same for today’s students they need to get rid of punitive testing.”

Under NCLB, schools that persistently underperform must allow students to enroll in other programs within the district, taking valuable state and federal funding that rides with every pupil. The penalties continue to snowball until downright school closure or charter-school takeover is prescribed. Other consequences include hiring a private company to take over operations or placing the school under direct state control.

Recently many districts have adopted value-added metrics, a set of data collected that link student standardized test performance to teacher quality, in evaluating teachers. Value-added approaches have been shown to be highly volatile and statistically unpredictable.

NCLB, the current iteration of the longstanding Early and Secondary Education Act passed under President Lyndon B. Johnon, uses a federal measure called Annual Yearly Progress to determine the progress of a school; U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters in June over 80 percent of schools are slated to fail according to AYP next year. Under NCLB, by 2014, nearly every school in the country is expected to have 100 percent of its students proficient according to state-administered tests used to fulfill NCLB regulations.

At the heart of the grievances voiced by groups like Save Our Schools is the diluting of traditional forms of education in favor of a one-size-fits-all legislative makeover they contend has not improved student proficiency in core subjects, nor have they led to increased graduation rates.

Recently, that rebuke gained new credibility with a May report from the National Academies of Science that concluded [PDF] “[i]ncentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes. As a result, different performance measures—that are not being used in the incentive system—should be used when evaluating how the incentives are working.”

On standardized exit exams for graduates, the report found these “high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement. The best available estimate suggests a decrease of 2 percentage points when averaged over the population.”

Consequences of the system

“Data is meaningless by itself without context,” Ravitch told TAI, explaining socio-economic conditions often dwarf the impact a teacher can have on a student. “Testing is good for collecting information to help students, not punishing them and their teachers.”

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education who mentors new teachers at Lesley University (and the mother of Matt Damon), told TAI her principal policy prescription would be to eschew applying “business standards on human value.” Lawmakers are making policies that are harmful to students, she said, and erode community control of schools.

In New Orleans, for example, charter schools operate chiefly under a type of self-contained school regulatory code that critics argue has undermined parental involvement in student affairs. Since Hurricane Katrina, only a handful of schools in New Orleans are neighborhood schools, meaning students are forced to attend classrooms miles away from their homes.

In a brief exchange with Matt Damon, he told TAI high-stakes testing and the attendant punishment applied to teachers of under-performing students is narrowing the curriculum for children and educators. “You wouldn’t allow business people to design military policy — why do we allow them to shape our education policy?” Damon asked.

Matt Damon speaks to reporters during the Save Our Schools rally (Mikhail Zinshteyn)

An increasing amount of school organizations including the National Education Association — the nation’s largest teacher union — have called out the coziness superintendents in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, as well as senior officials in the U.S. Department of Education, have with billionaire-affiliated foundations like the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation.

Union Input

Many local and regional union bodies attended the rally, their ranks made up chiefly of teachers and education specialists who have watched governors in Indiana and Wisconsin strip portions of their collective bargaining rights.

During a series of crowd interviews, Melissa Patterson, a Milwaukee school teacher of special education students ranging from the third- and fifth-grade level, told TAI she joined the march because “schools are falling apart, and the teachers are being blamed.” She pointed the finger at “politicians with no classroom experience” passing high-stakes testing legislation onto students. “We need adequate funding, and we have to kill Race to the Top,” Patterson said.

Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union, a labor group operating in the nation’s capital that experienced a series of setbacks under former Chancellor of D.C. Schools Michelle Rhee, told TAI increased community involvement and a pared-down reliance on test results in evaluating teachers and students would be at the front of his policy wish-list.

Mary Cathryn Ricker, an educator and local union president in St. Paul, Minnesota, balked at the notion parents and teachers wrangle for unrealistic spending promises from state and federal legislators.

“We need to change the discussion: move away from what we think schools need to what students need,” she said. “We need more teachers, students, and parents in the decision process [with lawmakers]; we should make a list of experiences we believe students should have, agree on those, and learn the cost,” she proposed.

The Student Program Chair of NEA, Tommie Leaders, also insisted more community involvement is necessary in education reform. He helps coordinate the labor group’s commitment to the 70,000 student teachers enrolled in traditional teacher colleges across the country.

“We have 50 states with separate and different education policies; a one-size-fits-all approach to the solution is not the policy prescription,” he said.

Next Steps

The traditional ally of teachers, the Democratic Party, and President Obama have turned from its base, said New York University Professor Pedro Noguera to the crowd. “When you lose your base, you lose your vote,” he cautioned.

Cathryn-Ricker believes a number of Democratic public representatives “stopped asking the teachers what the classrooms are like.” She says the Save Our Schools series of events, held on Thursday, Friday and at Saturday’s rally, is a launching pad for more action, telling TAI a return to addressing community-oriented education policy is key.

Throughout the event the subject of poverty was raised as the chief adversary of student learning. Melissa Patterson, the teacher from Milwaukee, told TAI she taught in the suburbs of Chicago as well, “and the support those students have financially makes a big difference.”

“I didn’t change the way I teach,” she added, “but the performance of those students and the ones I teach in Milwaukee was obviously different.”

Tomorrow, the Save Our School committee members will gather at American University to draft a new platform and determine what the group’s next steps should be. Bob Schaeffer, a test accountability specialist and one of the main organizers of the four-day event said the meeting would be closed to the media.

“When Bill Gates opens up his executive committee meetings [on education],” Schaeffer told TAI, “we’ll open up ours as well.”

Illegal immigrants are held at a detention facility in Phoenix, Ariz. (Mary F. Calvert/ZUMApress.com)

Until last week, local officials in Arlington, Va., Santa Clara, Calif., San Francisco and Washington, D.C., thought they’d have no trouble opting out of the Secure Communities program, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement initiative that runs fingerprints collected by local police through federal immigration databases. After all, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and an assistant attorney general had both written letters confirming that an opt-out was possible, and the ICE website even lists steps for communities to opt out.

[Immigration1] But in the past week, these local officials’ plans have been thrown into turmoil, as a senior ICE official told The Washington Post that opting out of the program was impossible and Napolitano confirmed on Wednesday, “We don’t consider Secure Communities an opt-in, opt-out program.”

Now, however, local officials say they plan to go ahead with the opt-out process. Arlington County Board member J. Walter Tejada, a Democrat, told TWI the county still intends to contact state and ICE officials to begin removing itself from the program.

“I’m aware there is some internal turmoil with ICE, but for us nothing has changed,” Tejada said. “We’re moving forward.”

Local politicians and activists say Napolitiano’s statements have not deterred them from pushing back against Secure Communities, arguing that ICE cannot impose the program without their consent. In many cases, however, it already has: ICE signs a memorandum of understanding with state officials to agree to the program, and local communities are often only notified they are participating after it has already taken place. If guidelines for opting out turn out to be meaningless, critics of the program say, then ICE has misled the public.

“If ICE for some reason decides not to follow through, I think we’re looking at possible massive deception,” said Sarahi Uribe, lead organizer of the Uncover The Truth Campaign, a coalition that opposes Secure Communities. “We’re going to continue to push for transparency and accountability.”

The path of fingerprints from local police stations to ICE has been obscured in public statements from the agency. Secure Communities is often explained as a fingerprint-sharing program between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials, which hints at a straight transfer of biometric information. But as The Washington Post reported, the program actually depends on an agreement between the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, meaning local jurisdictions have little control over where information they provide to one agency ends up. When fingerprints are submitted to the FBI to check for criminal records, they can be sent along to ICE without additional consent from local law enforcement agencies, an ICE official confirms.

This means opting out, at least in the sense local jurisdictions understood it, is impossible. All local police send fingerprints to states, which send it to the FBI for criminal background checks. The only way to withhold information from ICE under such a system would be to eliminate these checks entirely — something no jurisdiction has indicated it would be willing to do.

Local communities can only opt out of receiving information about why specific individuals needed to be detained; they cannot opt out of sending the fingerprints that could lead to their detention.

“That’s not really opting out because you’re still going to send a lot of people to ICE without due process,” said Angela Chan, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco. “‘Opt out’ means something much more: It means the information is never sent to ICE in the first place.”

Previous statements by government officials seem to back up that definition. Last month, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chairwoman of a House subcommittee on immigration, sent a letter to the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security requesting clear instructions for the opt-out process, which she defined as “how local law enforcement agencies may opt out of Secure Communities by having the fingerprints they collect and submit to the [state identification bureaus] checked against criminal, but not immigration, databases.”

In his Sept. 8 response, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich quoted her definition of opting out, then listed instructions for how a local jurisdiction could remove itself from the “Secure Communities deployment plan.”

Napolitano also responded without correcting Lofgren’s definition of what “opt out” would mean. A month later, as communities began to vote to opt out, the message seems to have changed. Immigrant rights groups and local officials are baffled — and angry — after beginning an opt-out process Napolitano now claims does not exist.

“We definitely were led to believe that we could opt out,” said D.C. City Council member Jim Graham, who led the charge for the District to opt out of the program. “Our chief of police had been negotiating a memorandum of understanding with the FBI.”

In San Francisco County, officials say they plan to move forward with removing the county from the program. Sheriff Michael Hennessey has already notified officials his county would like to opt out of the program and plans to meet with ICE staff and the California attorney general’s office after the Nov. 2 elections. Still, he said, the constant confusion over the program is frustrating.

“Obfuscation and misdirection seem to be ICE’s preferred method of communication, because that is all we have been getting so far,” Hennessey said.

Although ICE has said it prioritizes criminal illegal immigrants for deportation — and does deport more criminal than non-criminal illegal immigrants — some critics express concern about those caught up in the system by Secure Communities. Anyone who is arrested has his fingerprints taken, even if he is not ultimately charged with a crime. Even victims of crimes such as domestic abuse can be fingerprinted, and critics of the program argue they might not come forward if they fear they could be deported by reporting their abusers. According to ICE data released in August, one-quarter of the illegal immigrants deported through Secure Communities had no criminal records.

Opting out is also an issue of cost, critics claim. Secure Communities nets a larger number of illegal immigrants than routine law enforcement, particularly in communities that instruct officers not to ask about immigration status. This means higher costs when ICE asks police to hold people for immigration violations, Chan said.

ICE officials say they routinely ask local police to hold suspected illegal immigrants and that Secure Communities does not change that process.

Still, immigrant rights advocates argue the program must be voluntary because it was not created by federal law. Since local law enforcement agencies are not given additional funding for the program, requiring them to participate amounts to an unfunded federal mandate, Chan said.

“Unless it is federally mandated by Congress, then it seems they have to make sure there is a real mechanism for opting out,” said said Margaret Huang, executive director of the Rights Working Group, who lobbied for Arlington to opt out of the program. “If ICE has created a program that cannot respond to jurisdictions that want to be removed, they need to fix the program so they can.”

The email:

Dear Friend of Marriage,

Breaking news from Washington . . . .

9 U.S. Senators have agreed to co-sponsor a bill that would guarantee the right of DC residents to vote on same-sex marriage.

The bill will be introduced shortly and will complement a similar bill introduced in the House in January.  The House bill is HR4430, and I’ll keep you posted when the Senate Bill is introduced and assigned a number.

The next few days are crucial as we meet with legislators and seek support on Capitol Hill! We need your help right now.

Use this link to send an email to your Senators and Congressman. Tell them you want them to join as co-sponsors of the DC Marriage Initiative bill / HR4430, and even more importantly, push to ensure that the bill gets a vote on the Senate and House floors.

Sending Your Letter
The 9 Senate co-sponsors are Senators Robert Bennett (UT), Sam Brownback (KS), Jim Bunning (KY), John Cornyn (TX), Mike Enzi (WY), James Inhofe (OK), Pat Roberts (KS), David Vitter (LA), and Roger Wicker (MS).  The 2 House co-sponsors are Representatives Jason Chaffetz (UT) and Jim Jordan (OH).

When you use the link above to send your email message, you’ll see two letters. If your senator or congressman is one of the existing co-sponsors to the bill, they will receive the “Letter for Co-Sponsors.” Otherwise, your senators and congressman will receive the “Letter for All Others.”  Either way, your letter will be going to your own elected officials in Washington.  Please take a moment to personalize your letter to let your representatives in Washington know how important this issue is.

Your Voice Makes a Difference!
We face an uphill battle, and the next few days are extremely important as we gather support in Congress. NOM and Stand4MarriageDC are in meetings almost daily with various House and Senate offices, and we need your support. Your legislators need to hear not just from us, but from you — their own constituents who care about this important issue.

The Senate leadership just wants this issue to go away, and will do whatever they can to bury it in committee. That’s why every Senator needs to hear from people in his or her own state, urging him to stand up for the voting rights of DC residents.

An out-of-control city council tried to do an end run around the DC Charter, refusing to recognize the rights of DC voters to file an initiative petition on marriage. Regardless of where your representatives stand on same-sex marriage, tell them that we ought not stand for this sort of government abuse against the residents of our nation’s capital.

Tell your Senators and Congressman you want them to publicly stand for marriage and civil rights by co-sponsoring the DC Marriage Initiative Bill / HR4430. Tell them how important this issue is both for the future of marriage and for the rights of everyday citizens trying to stand up against a government machine.

Then tell them you want them to champion this issue, push for a vote, and not let Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid bury it in some subcommittee!

Please click here to send your message to Congress today!

Then forward this message to friends and family all across the country! Together we can stand up for DC voters and make sure they have a chance to be heard on marriage!

Presenters at the premiere of "Tea Party: The Documentary Film" Wednesday in Washington (Photo: David Weigel)

Getting into Wednesday’s Washington, D.C., premiere of “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” meant walking through a steady rain into the Ronald Reagan building, a sprawling downtown trade and convention center where the economic conservative group FreedomWorks, which helped organize a number of Tea Party protests, had rented a foyer and a sizable auditorium. The stars of the film relaxed and talked with former House Majority Leader and FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) handed out business cards to a steady stream of well-wishers. All of the guests made their way into the auditorium on the FreedomWorks version of a red carpet — a strip of green astroturf.

“We’re goofing on Hollywood,” said FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, dressed in evening wear alongside his wife Terry. “It was [producer] Luke Livingston’s idea.”

[GOP1]The award show trappings were the only tongue-in-cheek part of the evening. “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” is, according to its stars and filmmakers, an attempt to celebrate — and correct — the history of what Armey called a movement to “fulfill the destiny of this land.” Livingston said he and his volunteers paid for the movie, “maxing out our credit cards,” for a total of around $500,000. Two more members of Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), joined the proceedings to pay tribute to the activists who organized the 9/12 “taxpayer march on Washington,” which drew an estimated 60,000 people to the Capitol to protest the Democrats’ economic agenda. In remarks before the start of the film, Blackburn made a spirited pitch for Tea Partiers to come down to Nashville for February’s national Tea Party Convention.

“When you come to Tennessee,” said Blackburn, “they’ll be sure in telling you — like my husband likes to say — when it comes to taxes, if 10 percent is good enough for God on Sunday, it’s good enough for the government on Monday.”

Price, the sponsor of a resolution paying tribute to the 9/12 march, credited Tea Party activists with giving Republicans “the courage to do what we need to do.” After his short remarks, he asked more than a dozen activists to join him onstage to accept framed copies of the resolution, which has been sponsored by 148 members of the Republican conference but has not come up for a vote.

“It’s not like you haven’t seen one of these before,” Price said, passing off a copy to Armey, “but I don’t think you’ve seen one that truly recognizes freedom and liberty.”

For the activists, makers, and stars of the movie, it was all a bit overwhelming. The movie hadn’t been finished, said director Pritchett Cotten, until three days before the premiere. He and a small group of volunteers spent a month of 17-hour days editing the film with Apple’s Final Cut Pro software, stopping only for Thanksgiving. The finished product elicited many moments of spontaneous applause from the audience, as well as some tears, and a final standing ovation.

“Tea Party: The Documentary Film” is part tribute, part “official” history, and part human interest story. Cotten, who cut his teeth on commercials and corporate training films, has the most success with the human drama.

“I didn’t want to make a policy movie,” said Cotten.

Focusing on six people who participated in the 9/12 march at various levels, the film presents them — and, by extension, all Tea Partiers — as average Americans less concerned with partisanship or economics than with a government that, according to all six of the subjects, “doesn’t listen.”

In the film’s telling, the movement began with anger at President George W. Bush. His voice, announcing the September 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 with warnings of what will happen “if the free market is allowed to work,” is the first sound viewers hear at the start of the movie. Price, the member of Congress featured most often in the film, later argues that Tea Party anger goes back to the March 2008 collapse of BearStearns, and the government’s corresponding rescue package.

From there, the Tea Party movement is portrayed as a natural next step in America’s history of peaceful rebellion against the government. William, a minister and Revolutionary War re-enactor, explains how the movement is in step with the original Boston Tea Party. (The film’s footage depicting colonial America was filmed at Colonial Williamsburg, Va., according to one note in the credits.) Painstakingly, Cotten and his stars make the case against charges of “racism” in the movement, relying on William’s membership in a mostly African-American church and through the testimony of Nate, an African-American activist who is deeply apologetic about his 2008 vote for the Obama-Biden ticket.

“You have to understand how that played with the psyche of a black man or a black woman,” Nate says, “to see the highest seat of power, and it’s held by a black man.” The film shows Nate making the case to black men in Detroit that “black people we never really had a political voice.” He also admits that he stands out in the mostly-white Tea Party crowds of which he’s been a part. There is a “voice in my head,” he says, that tells him one day he’ll be less alone.

The race issue surfaces a few more times in “Tea Party,” most jarringly when a group of doctors, participating in the Sept. 10, 2009 mass lobbying effort in Congress, engage Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in a back-and-forth about health care reform. “It went well until he pulled the race card,” says Dr. Robert Shessell , another one of the film’s subjects, “and said the only reason they did it was to embarrass the first black president.” All of this, argue the filmmakers, is the height of irony. The music played during the march itself, titled “It’s Time to Party,” puts the march into a rich and multi-racial context: “in the spirit of Martin, of Gandhi, of Jesus.”

Another goal of the film is to challenge 10 months of media coverage while subtly deciding who does and does not speak for the movement. The role of FreedomWorks in helping to organize the 9/12 march is fully covered, down to a scene where Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots takes notes and talks on a conference call led by FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe. The closest the film gets to a suspense scene is a real-time account of a bomb threat against FreedomWorks, which occurs while Martin is in the office. “We’re going to come out twice as strong tomorrow,” Kibbe says to cheers from other activists. Notably less present in the movie — although there are images from some of its events — is Americans for Prosperity, the rival group which, unlike FreedomWorks , supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out Wall Street firms. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), an avid early endorser of the Tea Parties, does not appear in the film at all. But Livingston said he scrambled to include a shot of a sign reading “Thank You Glenn Beck,” hoping to grab the attention of the talk radio and Fox News star. That moment drew some of the screening’s loudest, rowdiest cheers.

The film, like Price’s resolution, also pushes forward the idea that turnout for the 9/12 march was larger than the media reported. Time lapse footage shows the 9/12 crowd at its maximum size. “The park service said this was the largest event that D.C. has ever had,” argues Jack, one of the organizers that Cotten’s camera followed to Washington. That isn’t true, but the controversial statement is followed quickly by emotional footage of Jack visiting the Vietnam War Memorial with other activists, eyes wet with tears. The film ends with a slow-motion shot of the flags at the World War II memorial. “I need you to stand up for our freedom!” says one of the rally’s African-American speakers. “Patriots! Stand up! Stand up! Stand up! Stand up!”

Inside the Reagan building, there was just as much enthusiasm, and just as much disinterest, with how the media was covering the movement. Armey joked from the stage about “liberal interlopers” in the room who could stick around and learn something. As he introduced Wilson, DeMint used the uproar over Wilson’s “you lie” outburst during President Obama’s joint speech to Congress in September to teach a lesson.

“When I heard this ‘you lie’ comment, the president turned and looked at me and I said ‘Oh no, they think it’s me,’” said DeMint. “The next day when I found it was Joe, I said ‘Oh no, he’s dead meat, they’re gonna get him.’ And a couple days later, I was saying — after he raised a few million dollars off of it — I was saying, ‘why didn’t I say that?” The lesson, he said, was to provide some “passion and anger.”

“The only reason we don’t have national health care right now,” said DeMint to the audience, “is you.”

This one was interesting. When I asked her if she was on Medicare, she said no, but she was carrying the sign for her friend who is on the government-run, single-payer health insurance program for older Americans. I asked the friend if she was happy with her Medicare, and she affirmed that she was.

Oh yeah, the Truthers were there.

A multi-issue voter.

I think this is a good one to end on.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

“If anyone does a fair analysis of the crowd, it’s a cross-section of the population,” he said in a phone interview.

I agreed that it was a geographically and economically diverse crowd, but I noted that the protesters were at least 99 percent white — in fact, in my four-plus hours at the event, I’d only seen three African-American demonstrators.

DeMint had a simple explanation. “It’s probably just the time and organization and the media that promoted it,” he said.

Well, that explains that.

Update: Thanks to our readers for bringing more realistic crowd size estimates to my attention.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and RNC Chairman Michael Steele (WDCpix)

The lengthy speech on health care that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele delivered on Monday was short on details. Republicans, said Steele, wanted to address “runaway costs,” and had a few ideas on how to do that, such as posting the cost of treatments “openly on the Internet,” supporting “bold new incentives” for medical breakthroughs, and “no life-time health care benefits and insurance for Congressmen who leave their jobs.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Most of Steele’s event at the National Press club consisted of scorching attacks on President Obama’s agenda for health care reform, and on the early drafts of health care legislation that have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office at around $1 trillion. Much of the speech had been telegraphed two weeks earlier in a poll conducted for the RNC and a corresponding memo from Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which argued that Republicans could kill Democratic plans for health care reform by dragging out the debate. “If we slow this sausage-making process down,” Castellanos wrote, “we can defeat it.” The “key message” for Republicans would be “We’ve got to ‘SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH’.” In his Monday speech, Steele used the word “experiment” or some version of it no fewer than 30 times. In a new television ad airing in North Dakota, Nevada, and Arkansas — all states with at least one Democratic senator on the ballot in 2010–the RNC casts health care reform, again, as a “risky experiment.”

Steele’s performance was less a kick-off, more an amplification of a year-long conservative campaign that is entering its final months without much remaining subtlety. Republicans are in the precarious position of arguing for a “pause button,” as Steele put it, in the ongoing negotiations over health care, while Democrats are aware that any pause or slow-down would effectively kill reform in the 111th Congress. There are Republican alternatives that have no chance of passage; the Patients’ Choice Act sponsored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for example, has six co-sponsors. Republicans are testing brand-new health care messaging against Democrats in swing states, while those same Democrats are aware that a failure to pass health care reform would drain their political capital and worsen their chances of re-election in 2010.

“If it doesn’t happen this year it’s not going to happen,” said one House GOP aide. “If too many members have concerns about this in an off-year, even their ranks are only going to grow in an election year.”

It’s been difficult for Republicans to avoid the occasional blunt remark that reveals that fact. High-minded “working groups” on health care reform have given way to an alliance with Rick Scott, the former private hospital CEO who launched Conservatives for Patients’ Rights in March. Scott’s checkered experience in health care — he resigned from Columbia/HCA in 1997 after a $1.7 billion fraud settlement — did not immediately win him many public alliances with the GOP. But by the time Scott appeared at the launch of Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) launch of his own health care plan in June, some Republicans were echoing the message in his TV ads, that Congress needed to slow down the pace of health care reform.

After that event, in a brief conversation with TWI, Scott remarked that “the debate really changed” since he’d launched his group, and that a slow-down of reform would be the end of Democratic plans for health care. “If they don’t get it done by October,” said Scott, “it’s not going to get done.”

The directness of Scott’s campaign backfired a little last week when he co-hosted a conference call with DeMint. On the call, DeMint argued that a Republican victory on health care would “break” Obama and steer political momentum away from Democrats. In a Monday night interview with the News Hour on PBS, the president credited DeMint with saying what Republicans were really thinking. “There is a certain portion of the Republican Party that views this like they saw ’93, ’94, the last time there was a major health-reform effort,” said the president. “They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done … it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House.”

All of this puts Republicans in the acrobatic position of throwing up roadblocks to kill health care reform this year while, in the states, attempting to convince vulnerable Democrats that successful health care reform would be a political boondoggle that could end their control of Congress. In conversations with TWI, Republican strategists in the states targeted by the RNC’s new ads had some difficulty squaring the circle. “We all saw what happened the last time there was a major push by a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to mandate government-run health care,” said Robert Uithoven, a Republican strategist in Nevada. While Uithoven acknowledged that the Democrats of 1994 stumbled by failing to pass any health care reform, he argued that success this year could be a problem, too. “Harry Reid succeeding on this would be disastrous for the country. The more people learn about the cost, the more dangerous it is for Reid to succeed in this effort.”

Bill Vickery, an Arkansas Republican strategist who plans to work for his party’s nominee against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), claimed that it would be “politically disastrous” for the senator to support a health care bill with a public plan. “If she votes for it and it passes you say, once again, she sided with the ultra-liberal president, she’s a toady for the administration. If she votes against it, maybe it’s a non-starter politically. And if she votes for it and the bill fails anyway, you make a more nuanced version of that first argument.”

Those arguments run up against the plans of other vulnerable Democrats, who are already running on health care reform. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who has taken the lead on health care legislation in the absence of the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), is on the air with ads that feature Kennedy praising Dodd for his work on “the cause of my life.” Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), who is running against Dodd, has an opening if reform falters.

“Dodd believes that whatever legislation he rams through Congress will accrue to his benefit,” said Jim Barnett, Simmons’ campaign manager. “The problem is that voters are judging him on honesty, and nobody trusts him, so he’s staking a lot on the idea he that he’s getting things done in the Senate. If the effort fails or if it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, it will be painful for him.”

The AANR will be visiting a handful of congressional offices, but it is keeping the names of the lawmakers close to the chest (pun intended).

AANR members hope to increase the number of locations for enjoying nude recreation on public lands. And like a good lobbying association, AANR is armed with hard data. The group states, “Several polls taken of the traveling public indicate that nearly 20 percent of all persons in North America enjoy skinny-dipping and nude sunbathing.”

According to The Hill, the AANR representatives are expected to be clothed during their visit to the Capitol.

(Via FamousDC)