Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told The Daily Caller that President Barack Obama is distorting GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s record and positions on education issues.
Jindal added that even if Obama has “the oratorical skills of Winston Churchill and Presidents Reagan and Lincoln combined,” he can’t “defend” his administration’s record.
TheDC asked for Jindal’s response to the Obama campaign saying Romney wants to cut teachers.
“It’s absolutely not true. … What Gov. Romney has said is, one, he wants to give parents more choices about where their kids go to school so they actually empower parents so their kids get a great education,” he told TheDC after the second presidential debate.
“Secondly, he says he wants to encourage states to actually reward great teaching in the classroom because the research all shows the single most effective predator of whether a child is going to do well academically is the quality of their teacher, yet too many of our states’ policies on tenure, on compensation, on hiring and firing,
aren’t tied to actual teacher effectiveness due to the treatment.”
Obama “simply wants to throw more resources” and “more money” at public education which “clearly is not the answer,” Jindal said.
“If that was the answer, we’d already have the best education system in the world. … So the bumper sticker on the other side is really easy; it’s easy for the president to get up there and distort the governor’s policies. Bottom line is Gov. Romney’s been very, very clear he wants to give parents more choices and he wants to reward effective
teaching. That’s what it’s going to take to get back to the United States being No. 1 in the world.”
TheDC also asked Jindal if he thinks the role of the federal government is to hire teachers and public safety workers on the local and state levels, as Obama continues to propose.
“No, look education has always been, in our country, historically been done at the local level, obviously with some state supervision and that’s the way it should continue to be. It’s primarily a local responsibility and that’s the way it should be,” Jindal told TheDC.
“President Obama can’t run on his record, he can’t run on his failed policies, and so he’s gotta try and distract the American people. We’ve had four years of these policies and they haven’t worked. What they’ve resulted in is over a trillion dollars of debt every year. What they’ve resulted in is an economy where 23 million unemployed, underemployed Americans.”
Jindal said taxpayers cannot “afford” Obama’s ideas.
“I almost feel sorry for the president because the reality is, I don’t care if he had the oratorical skills of Winston Churchill and presidents Reagan and Lincoln combined, he still wouldn’t be able to defend his record. And so it’s no surprise that
he’s promising more of the same,” Jindal told TheDC.
“He’s trying to promise more of the things that the American people simply can’t afford…The president only does well in the polls when he spends millions of dollars on ads distorting the governor’s record. When the governor speaks directly to the American people, they see he cares about them, they see he has effective policies to help grow the
economy for the middle class. They see he’s a reasonable guy.”
Sarah Hofmann contributed to this report.
