Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Posted on 02/27/2012 5:08:49 PM PST by SeekAndFind
First came Mitt Romney's dismissive remarks about President Obama's "faculty lounge" pals. Now Rick Santorum is calling Obama snobby for urging people to go to college - and defending that view in a series of TV appearances.
"There are lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don't include college," Santorum said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "We should not look down our nose" at people who go to trade school to learn carpentry or plumbing, he added on NBC's Meet The Press, "and say they're somehow less" because they didn't get a four-year college degree.
Hunh. You'd almost think Santorum was trying to win the blue-collar vote in a bunch of Rust Belt primaries, or tap into conservatives' resentment of "some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate" their kids, as he put it recently.
What do Santorum and Romney have against higher education? They certainly have enough of it themselves. They each hold three degrees - bachelor's, MBA, and law - to Obama's paltry two. Romney earned his two graduate degrees at Harvard; he sometimes talks about his father's humble origins, but his father is best known as an auto executive and governor of Michigan. Santorum often plays up his coal-miner grandfather, but his father was a clinical psychologist, which requires a doctorate.
Both Republican contenders have been painting Obama as an elitist for months. In at least two election-night speeches, Romney has begun sentences about Obama this way: "Like his colleagues in the faulty lounge who think they know better ..." He used to specify the "Harvard faculty lounge," but apparently we're now talking about all faculty lounges. A broad brush, true, and it could lead to some problems staffing up if he won the White House. But it does eliminate the inconsistency with Romney's own Harvard career, and probably makes his campaign's domestic policy director feel better. The adviser, Lanhee Chen, has four Harvard degrees, according to a website that tracks California people and politics.
Santorum - who has a lot of definitive prescriptions for the sex lives of others - also constantly characterizes Obama as someone who wants to dictate to others how to live. "We have a leader that believes he knows what's best," he said Saturday at an Americans For Prosperity rally in Troy, Mich. "The elite think they can manage your life better than you can."
He has taken particular offense lately at what he perceives as Obama's push for people to go to college so they can be "remade" in Obama's image. "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said in Troy. He went on to add, "Not all folks are gifted in the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands."
Could Harvard alums Obama or Romney have gotten away with a remark like that? Doubtful, even if they softened it by adding, as Santorum did on ABC, that there are "technical schools, there's additional training, vocational training. There's skills and apprenticeships. There's all sorts of things that people can do to upgrade their skills to be very productive and build their community."
As it happens, what Santorum is saying is very close to what Obama has said. Some of the president's highest profile remarks on the subject came in a February 2009 address to a joint session of Congress: "I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship."
A year ago, Obama did say this: "We need to make sure we're graduating students who are ready for college and a career." Maybe that's the offense that ignited Santorum's ire. Yet it's hard to imagine people wanting a president who disagrees. College graduates earn more money, endure less unemployment, and are vital to the country's economic future. The political thinking behind Santorum's rhetoric is clear, but that doesn't make the sentiment any less jarring.
leftists are literally insane
John Hughes, a rare Republican in Hollywood, had a great line about college in his film “She’s Having a Baby”...Kevin Bacon is lamenting his constant education by describing college as “high school with ash trays”. So true.
What was this little pissants reason for writing this article?
I mean, other than taking snobby swipes at perfect valid observations?
Batter marxism through indoctrination.
I don’t have any issues with college but not all should go. Its become a very expensive taxpayer funded government jobs program.
Rick wants people to have the opportunity to go to college IF THEY WANT TO.
But if they don’t want to, that’s OK, too.
My plumber earns $75 an hour
This is what he charges in a small, working class town.
How many people can say they earn $75 an hour?
Of course, he has expenses, but he is living very well, complete with nice vacations down south. He’s his own boss, and what would we do without plumbers?
College is great, if that’s what you want to do, but so are the trade careers.
And boy, is it ever hard to get an electrician, if you only have small jobs. I wish more would go to trade schools and become electricians.
Think of all of the workmen, who have repaired/improved your home. What would we do without them?
Obama is a Harvard alum? Too bad there’s no record to prove it. If he’s so ashamed of his college experience as to not even provide any documentation of that alleged fact, then he is going after the blue-collar vote, just like it is said about Santorum.
Neither Steve Jobs or Bill Gates completed college. Most truly intelligent people learn little in college.
The template is "War" -- "war on college," "war on women," "war on science" -- and that drum is going to be pounded from now to election day.
Candidates have got to choose their words very carefully. Anything they think sounds clever or catchy or brilliant or folksy should probably be avoided in favor or blander language. There are plenty of other people online who can do clever and catchy.
Problems with College
Communist Professors
expensive degrees that lead to no jobs
aiding in the moral decay of society
want more??
Since we have a high school drop out rate of at least thirty percent, and some cities probably surpass fifty percent, maybe they should start there.
{Most truly intelligent people learn little in college.}
Dumb ones either.
Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
I don't watch Holmes works at McDonalds because his Liberal Arts Degree is worthless and he has $150,000 in Student Loans that he will never be able to payoff because he was ripped off by Big College...
I think they have a 40% dropout rate as well.
Sounds like good College material to me. /s
More and more folks are coming to recognize higher education as the next “bubble”.
There are still some fine colleges and some excellent college teachers, and if a kid is sufficiently mature and adequately motivated, one can with a little work still get an excellent education.
But for the majority of kids who go continue on to the university level it’s an opportunity to put their parents (or themselves) a quarter million dollars in debt, while breezing through dumbed-down, politically-slanted courses while spending the majority of their time getting high and “hooking up” with the opposite sex (well, maybe the opposite sex).
Trust me on this, but grading standards in all but the fundamental sciences and engineering disciplines have gotten so lax that if you qualify for admission to a prestige school, you can fake your way through enough courses without cracking a book or (often) even attending class to graduate with almost no real intellectual effort - you actually have to go out of your way to flunk some of these douche classes.
At the end of 5 years of partying, you get a little stamp on your forehead that says you’re an Ivy League graduate, and then you can move on to the real world where you can hustle gasoline-from-algae to a gullible electorate that’s probablly picked up their technological savvy (or lack thereof) from the same sorts of institutions.
Don’t get me wrong but I wouldn’t want to cross a bridge or fly on an airplane that hadn’t been designed by brilliant highly educated engineers.
I also wouldn’t like to witness a degreed Womens Studies graduate wire up a transfer switch for her emergency generator. Smoking flesh smells give me a tummy-ache.
Colleges are full of lefties.
It goes a bit beyond whether any generic president wishes everyone to go to college or not - not when you have the state throwing billions at higher education, allowing the cost of a college degree to grow at three times the rate of inflation.
I'm shocked. /s
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