Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2002

That the National Socialist Democrat Party (NSDP) is owned lock, stock and pork barrel by some powerful special interests should come as no surprise to anyone who pays attention to where the NSDP's money and muscle come from and whose water they carry.

Majority stockholders in the NSDP include the bosses of big labor, the abortion industry, the trial lawyers of America, the National Education Association (NEA) and other teachers unions, and the extremist wing of the environmentalist movement.

The NSDP marches to the tune played by these special interests, all of which pour huge sums of money into the campaign coffers of NSDP candidates and supply armies of workers to staff their campaign organizations.

A case in point is one Bill McBride, the NEA's chosen candidate to unseat Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush. McBride rose out of nowhere to challenge former Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno in the NSDP's gubernatorial primary.

He came out of the box a virtual political unknown, already armed with the full backing of the NEA and the FEA (Florida Education Association, the Florida teachers union), raised tons of special interest money, and beat Reno by a hair.

As I wrote recently, McBride is an ex-Marine who, as such, should know better – us Marines make lousy socialists. He's running on a platform promising to improve the state's schools – an interesting claim given that he is the hand-picked, lavishly financed candidate of the FEA and the NEA, the very people who have wrecked and continue to wreck America's schools while they dance around flinging condoms at fifth graders.

The FEA has admitted that it mortgaged its state headquarters building to raise more than $1.5 million to finance the defeat of President George W. Bush's brother in Florida's gubernatorial election.

As revealed this week in an investigative report by National Review Online, "$1.7 million in equity the FEA sucked out of its South Adams Street building" was earmarked nearly two years ago for the explicit purpose of pummeling Jeb Bush in order to embarrass President Bush, even though many rank and file teachers support the Bush brothers. Some of that money helped put the political unknown McBride in the race against Janet Reno and is now backing him against Jeb Bush.

As the NEA claims, "The Florida Education Association's [FEA] efforts paid off with Democrat Bill McBride's victory. FEA is credited with pushing McBride's campaign forward with an incredible grassroots initiative mobilizing members of the FEA."

As I wrote recently, expecting a man as thoroughly beholden to the educrats as Bill McBride to undo the mess the NEA has created in the nation's schools would be like expecting a Mafia don to solve the problem of organized crime. The NEA has a stranglehold on America's education system and has no intention of loosening its lethal grip. Take their money, dance to their tune.

McBride is the great white hope of the NSDP, which is still smarting over Al Gore's failure to steal the presidential election in Florida. The NSDP doesn't like to be thwarted – look how fast they dumped Robert Torricelli when it became apparent he was a sure loser – and they particularly resented being prevented from using their traditional vote-stealing tactics in Florida in 2000. So Jeb Bush must be made to pay.

They showed their gratitude to Janet Reno for her blatant stonewalling of all attempts to bring Bill Clinton and Al Gore to justice for the illegal campaign finance finagling by simply dumping her and trotting out trial lawyer McBride as their Florida version of New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg.

Like Torricelli, Reno was an obvious loser, so off with her head. These people don't kid around. Winning is all, no matter what it costs or who it hurts.

So now in McBride they have a candidate amenable to the hopes and desires and schemes of all of the well-heeled, not-so-far behind-the-scenes puppeteers, and the bucks have been pouring in.

The NSDP makes no bones about what all of this is about. In addition to roping in NEA and trial lawyers, they've gone hunting for more money out of state by bringing McBride to New York on a lightning fund-raising expedition, having very private money raisers in such places as New York's 21 Club – a place where Florida's teachers would never get past the front door.

He was guest of honor at a breakfast there hosted by former Sen. Bob Kerry and Florida Sen. Bill Nelson and attended by about two dozen fat-cat givers, according to the Associated Press.

"You know it's big if Bill McBride wins this," Nelson said. "It has a foretelling of what will happen in the '04 presidential race, and so all the more reason that the stakes are exceptionally high."

After this, McBride went up to Connecticut for a luncheon, where he rubbed shoulders with former President Clinton and his lovely wife, Bruno, as R. Emmett Tyrell elegantly styles the inelegant Mrs. Clinton.

McBride appears to be the ideal candidate for the NSDP and the NEA and the trial lawyers: He has serious problems with the truth, a fact frequently noted by Florida's media, not famous for their adherence to the GOP or its policies.

He has been running a TV ad that displays the cover of a book claiming to report the ranking of Florida's educational system. The ad describes the book as one issued by a prestigious organization, without bothering to explain that the book, "Rankings of the States 2001 and Estimates of School Statistics 2002," is the work of – Guess what? Surprise! – the NEA.

McBride's sleazy attacks on Jeb Bush's record on educational issues has drawn fire from the state's media.

The statistics used in corporate lawyer Bill McBride's latest ad attacking Gov. Jeb Bush are "misleading" and "not universally recognized as accurate and fair," charges the Orlando Sentinel. According to the Bush campaign, the Sentinel said, McBride's numbers are misleading at best and often simply wrong. In response, the Bush campaign called on McBride to immediately pull his false and misleading ad off the air.

McBride's ads say that Florida has a 53.8 percent graduation rate, which would rank the state 49th nationally, while the Sentinel points out that this figure "was calculated by figuring the percentage of high-school freshmen from 1996 who graduated four years later. The method does not account for students who move out of state or switch to private schools. Florida's method is more accurate. Using identification numbers, the state tracks individual students from their first-time enrollment in ninth grade to their expected graduation date four years later. Incoming transfer students, as well as outgoing transfer students, are removed from the tracked population. The 2001 graduation rate, the latest one available, was 63.8 percent."

The Sentinel also noted that "Florida's low SAT ranking also is misleading. States with the highest average scores test the fewest students. Florida encourages students to take the test, and 57 percent of its students did."

Finally, the Sentinel notes that McBride's statistics are "not universally recognized as accurate and fair. On per-capita spending, for instance, the statistics fail to account for Florida's elderly population, which is disproportionately larger than other states."

McBride's statistics on spending, the Sentinel said, do "not factor in the effects of the Legislature reducing the contributions school districts must make to the Florida Retirement System. That enabled districts to spend millions of dollars more on programs without increasing overall spending."

According to Bush spokesman Todd Harris, "Bill McBride is again deceiving the people of Florida. The Orlando Sentinel today confirmed what we have been saying all week, which is that McBride is filling the airwaves with false and misleading attacks on Governor Bush's education record. McBride has no real plan of his own to improve public schools, and so the only thing he can do is twist the truth about our record. He should pull his ad immediately and spare Floridians from any more of his false attacks."

McBride's attacks on Jeb Bush's alleged failure to spend enough money on education drew more fire from the St. Petersburg Times, which revealed that Gov. Bush's education spending increases over the past four years have been greater than those of either of his Democrat predecessor's two terms.

According to the Times analysis, under Gov. Bush, funding for education has increased by $3 billion, a 27 percent increase in total funding. The Times found that even when adjusted for inflation and growth, per-student spending under Gov. Bush has increased by $212.

The analysis also revealed that under Bush, Florida was one of only four states in the nation to increase school funding this year. In fact, according to a congressional study on states' education spending, commissioned by none other than Sen. Ted Kennedy, Florida had the second-highest real increase in educational spending of any state, second only to Texas. The Times also pointed out that per-student-education funding was cut under the previous Democrat administration.

As the Bush campaign notes, since 1998, "funding for education has increased by $3 billion, a 27 percent increase in total funding. Moreover, funding has been targeted to help low-performing schools improve, and they are. Under the Governor's Assistance Plus program, F schools are receiving extra training and teaching resources for students and schools in greatest need of help."

The media also have jumped on McBride's habit of telling one group one thing and another group something entirely different. Says the Miami Herald, McBride has "a propensity to shift his message depending on the audience."

He has been all over the lot on his stand on gun control, for example, to the point where nobody knows where he stands on the issue.

McBride is eminently qualified as an ideal NSDP candidate: He lusts for an opportunity to spend huge amounts of taxpayers' dollars. If all of his campaign promises were fulfilled, it would cost the taxpayers of Florida an additional $29 billion in new spending and a whole bunch of new taxes to finance his proposed spending spree.

His proposal to reduce class sizes – one which, by the way, would involve hiring thousands of new teachers and balloon FEA membership in the process – would cost an extra $2.5 billion annually in 2002 dollars, according to a Florida Tax Watch Briefing in July 2002.

Who's paying for all of this? According to the Miami Herald, "McBride proposed spending more on schools by increasing taxes on cigarettes by 50 cents a pack and repealing $420 million in corporate tax breaks … pushing a tax increase and embracing a repeal of tax breaks."

McBride said he was willing to take on new taxes, the Orlando Sentinel reported. And writing in the Orlando Sentinel on Sept. 24, 2002, Myriam Marquez charged: "McBride won't touch the idea of a services tax – at least not for his lawyer or accountant pals. … Where, then, will he get the money for better schools and better health care for children and the elderly? A cigarette tax hike won't cover it all."

Not to worry. McBride is an NSDP candidate. He'd manage to gouge it out of the taxpayers one way or another. That's what Socialist Democrats do.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com

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