One DFER friend emailed me to say that I had embarassed both Obama and frontrunner Hillary Clinton by linking to their actual speeches before the National Education Association on You Tube. Quoth he in an email:

Based on the clips, I think your posting was too soft on Obama and Clinton.  I found the clips to be somewhere between shamefully ignorant and just plain shameful.  Political pros like these two are generally lacking in the human emotion of shame, but it is always sad to see it on such a grand scale...

Zing! Wow. Actually my wife had the same reaction.  Perhaps I expect shame, and thus, wasn't surprised?

Another DFER friend emailed in this morning's Obama editorial from the Wall Street Journal before I even had my first cup of coffee:

Obama's School Uniform
July 9, 2007; Page A14

In March Barack Obama declared that his "main opponent in this race isn't other candidates -- it's cynicism." It's remarkable, though, how cynical his candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination has already become. The conflict between appearance and reality was distilled to its essence in a speech delivered on Thursday before the National Education Association's annual convention.

The NEA is the country's largest teachers union, and Mr. Obama at least gestured toward merit pay, a heresy to the public education bureaucracy. But in toto, Mr. Obama's policy proposals to the NEA were dominated by ritual obeisance to the union and orthodox thinking. Bill Clinton would have attacked this in 1992 as Old Democratic thinking.

Merit pay was a minor item in an overflowing gift basket to the teachers unions, and besides, was presented as part of a plan for "finally raising salaries across the board." Maybe compensation will be bumped up because of merit, but it will be bumped up for everyone regardless: Mr. Obama called current teacher salaries "morally unacceptable." He believes the problem with American education is that the schools haven't been given "the resources and the support" they need. He plans to plow "billions of new dollars into the teaching profession."

Mr. Obama came out for "programs that allow new teachers to learn from veteran professionals." Forget alternative certification; instead create new teacher training programs, and then have the government "pay off some of those college loans." Why teachers, but not, say, engineers?

Mr. Obama says he'll present the specifics of his plan at a later date, but it's hard to see how his pay-for-performance idea will work in practice, given that he trashed testing as a tool for accountability. "We can find new ways to increase pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them and not based on some arbitrary tests," he noted. He also denounced No Child Left Behind -- whatever its faults, an effort to introduce standards into the schools -- as "one of the emptiest slogans in the history of politics." Mr. Obama is to the left of Rep. George Miller and the House Democrats.

The schools aren't troubled because they're underfunded. They're underperforming. Yet Mr. Obama waved off any provisions for school choice, voicing his commitment to "fixing and improving our schools instead of abandoning them and passing out vouchers." The NEA couldn't ask for a better tribune.

So far Mr. Obama has been shrewd in setting himself off from left-wing orthodoxy, though perhaps mainly as a matter of style. But if he is going to ask voters to consider the Presidency an entry-level position, he'll need to do more than dress up liberal commonplaces as bold truth-telling.

Meanwhile, Roy Romer thinks now is the time for the other candidates to go beyond the pandering. We have to, or our party will have failed yet another generation of kids.