"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

"I no longer hope for audacity."

From HuffPo:
Matt Damon, one of Barack Obama's earliest supporters and once one of his most staunch advocates, slammed the President in the new issue of Elle Magazine.

"I've talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, 'Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician,'" Damon tells the magazine. "You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better."

Referring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, Damon continued: "If the Democrats think that they didn't have a mandate -- people are literally without any focus or leadership, just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off ... Imagine if they had a leader."

That echoes the President's own words to Diane Sawyer in March of 2010 when he said, "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president... There's a tendency in Washington to think that our job description, of elected officials, is to get reelected. That's not our job description. Our job description is to solve problems and to help people."

The slam follows in the same vein as a number of other criticisms Damon has made of the President and the Democrats, including in March, when he criticized Obama's education policy.

"I really think he misinterpreted his mandate. A friend of mine said to me the other day, I thought it was a great line, 'I no longer hope for audacity,'" Damon told CNN host Piers Morgan. "He's doubled down on a lot of things, going back to education... the idea that we're testing kids and we're tying teachers salaries to how kids are performing on tests, that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher order. We're training them, not teaching them." . . . .

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