On the other hand, this is an election year in his president’s adopted hometown. So when CTU president Karen Lewis recently said she missed a scheduled negotiation session with the board of education because she was “on phone calls with national and other labor leaders,” we believe her. What are those leaders saying? Per flack-in-chief Jay Carney, President Obama has “has not expressed any opinion or made any assessment about this particular incident” and, of course, is thinking first and last of the students.
But if the strike drags on (and it may: the city’s 1987 teachers’ strike lasted 19 days), it could become a conversation-shifting news peg. It would draw attention to the Janus-faced nature of the administration’s education policy, which features the president regurgitating the kind of stale talking points about class size that get CTU reps salivating at the same time his education secretary (and former Chicago superintendent) Arne Duncan is questioning the importance of class size and pushing for the very teacher-evaluation metrics that the union is fighting. Add to all this the fact that Emanuel has just taken a lead role in Obama campaign fundraising, and both the White House and city hall have every reason to leverage both board and union for a speedy resolution.
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