All about Sharron Angle (The background of the woman and why Harry Reid has to be worried)

When Sharron Angle stepped into National Review’s boardroom on Monday, she wasn’t flanked by a phalanx of aides. It was just her; her husband, Ted; and a friend. They sat down, cracked open Diet Cokes, and began to chat. Sen. Harry Reid, we thought, would be the main topic of conversation. We all wanted to find out about how Angle, Nevada’s GOP Senate nominee, plans to topple the Senate majority leader come November. While we heard a lot about that, NR also learned a bit more — about who Angle is, and why she’s running.

“I’m an accidental politician,” Angle says. Forty years ago, she recalls, two big things happened during her senior year at the University of Nevada, Reno: One, she married Ted, and two, she changed her academic focus from the fine arts to education. That education bug was reawakened eleven years later, in 1981, when her son, she says softly, “failed kindergarten.”

“After he failed kindergarten, I put him back in for that second year and he was completely demoralized,” Angle explains. “What I had was a six-year-old dropout. I knew that I needed to do something different for this kid, to kind of put him back on his wheels and get him started again. I decided to homeschool him.” As a trained teacher, Angle thought she could provide her son with a better environment, one where he wasn’t called a “flunker” or “too slow” by his classmates at the local public school. So Angle, a Southern Baptist, started what she calls an “exempt Christian school” for likeminded families, a homeschool group for parents in Winnemuca, Nev.

Such a transition should have been easy. At the time, Nevada law allowed parents to homeschool their kids — their call, end of story. So Angle thought. Then, the Wallace family, friends of the Angles’ who decided to homeschool their kids as well, found themselves in hot water. The local school district caused a fuss, saying the children were truant and that they must enroll or be placed in foster homes.

“A judge said, ‘I know it’s the law that you can homeschool in Nevada, but the law should be that you can’t, unless you live more than 50 miles away from the nearest school,’” Angle says, shaking her head at the memory. “At that point, I realized that the government had interfered with my family. It was kind of like a mother bear and her cubs: Don’t get between me and my cubs, or you’ve got trouble.”

Angle and friends fought back. “I went with 500 other people to push for a new homeschooling law in Nevada,” she says. “That was my first encounter with the legislature.” As a result, during the 1983 legislative session in Carson City, assemblywoman Jane Ham introduced a bill to strengthen the state’s homeschooling law. The assembly’s education committee heard testimony from what Angle calls a “who’s who” of homeschooling, including Dr. Raymond Moore, the man often dubbed the “grandfather” of the homeschooling movement.

Ultimately, Ham’s bill died in the state Senate, but, thanks to the pressure of the homeschool moms, the state education board soon adopted new regulations more favorable to homeschoolers. While that welcome-to-politics moment convinced Angle that she “needed to do something,” she spent the ensuing ten years raising her two sons, teaching, and staying involved in the community in nonpolitical ways. Throughout that time, however, she remained interested in policy, and in 1992, she ran for, and won, a seat on the Nye County school board. In 1998, Angle found herself back in Carson City, this time as an elected assemblywoman herself. She spent most of her time on the education committee, gaining notice for tendency to vote “no” on, well, most everything. She’d go on to serve four terms there, before retiring in 2006 to run, unsuccessfully, for a U.S. House seat.

Just before leaving the state legislature in 2007, Angle submitted various drafts of homeschool-freedom laws. Out of office, she paid a small fee to be a citizen lobbyist and helped shepherd one to passage. For her, it was a crowning career achievement, making it easier for parents to choose to homeschool while eliminating the requirement for homeschoolers to provide “equivalent instruction” to that in the public schools. It also boosted the privacy rights of homeschooling parents.

Out of office, but still looking to be a voice for “more freedom and less government,” Angle decided to run for the Senate. Her campaign was overtly unconventional in its presentation: No fuss, no gloss, just Sharron. Turns out, in Nevada at least, that approach works — with, of course, a little help from the Tea Party Express and other conservative groups.

“I’ve seen government from many sides,” Angle says, smiling. “Legislator, school board, citizen in the initiative process. I have a multifaceted background in education. I’ve done public-school teaching, private school, homeschooling, and tutoring for juvenile justice. I’ve taught adults at community college.” So when she says that she wants to dump the entire Department of Education, she comes across as a warm grandma who’s fought the beast, knows it, and detests it, not as some anti-government demagogue.

“Look, the Department of Education is a policy machine that sends down one-size-fits-all rules that fit no one,” Angle says. “Education works best when you have all of the stakeholders involved and working toward the same commitment. That happens best at the local level. Anything bureaucratically, administratively, these layers and layers — that just diminishes the involvement of the stakeholder. They feel like their voice isn’t being heard because there is too much of a loud clamor from the top.”

Harry Reid should be worried. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, he’s down eleven points to Angle, 50 percent to 39 percent. National Democrats, however, hardly seem flustered, and hope to tag Angle as a tea-party extremist, as some kooky cut-guv’ grandma. Maybe that’ll work, but if Nevadans hear about Angle’s education journey, it’ll likely be Reid who gets schooled.

— Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

I know Marc Levin is a huge fan. The more I hear about her the more I pray for her victory. A parrot would be a better choice than Reid, but she sounds great in her own right. We need 99 more like her in the Senate.

We have to be very careful here because some people are saying that the lamestream media will want to exploit every single statement she makes.

Some call her the female version of Rand Paul ( not that I believe that, but that’s how she is being painted ).

Sharron is an admirable patriotic strong willed candidate. I think Harry Reid is going to find out how it feels to spend 12 million dollars and get nothing for it.

“lamestream media will want to exploit every single statement she makes.”

Of course they will! But, it’s belly up to the bar time for Nevadans. Will they be intimidated by the Weenie Olbermanns of the world or will they kick that pos out of office?

Never be ashamed of your opinion. Leftwing nuts try to shame conservatives into backing out from what they say. If you’re tired of the gubment, be proud and say so!

How will the Nazi Press portray her? Will they call her a failed mom because her son struggled? Will they call her a racist because she home schooled her son? How many stops will they pull out? Will the DNC hire lawyers to go after her past to find something they can distract her with? Will Herr Reid mobilize his Nazi Digital Brown Shirts to smear her? This is a fight for the people of Nevada, to oust the fascist senator and elect a true representative

I think my new tagline describes the kind of person Sharron Angle is.

In other words, she’s a true American.

Angle certainly deserves to win.

People that can should home school. I'd hate to have a kid indoctrinated in the state religion of Atheism and be taught the junk science of globull warming.

With Reid's record of forcing cap n’ trade and 0bamacare down our throats, if I lived in Nevada I'd vote for a corpse over him.

‘“lamestream media will want to exploit every single statement she makes.”

Of course they will! But, it’s belly up to the bar time for Nevadans. Will they be intimidated by the Weenie Olbermanns of the world or will they kick that pos out of office?

Never be ashamed of your opinion. Leftwing nuts try to shame conservatives into backing out from what they say. If you’re tired of the gubment, be proud and say so!”

It's best just to turn off the TV except for Fox News.

I get my news from the radio and the Internet.
The newspapers have become an embarrassing Marxist/Alinsky/”Millions of Degrees” Gore/Leftwing nutjob cesspools.

The more they say false insults about our side, the more I know I'm in the right

"I'm Harry Reid and I approve this message"

(pic hijacked from another thread... too perfect :) )

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