No doubt there is a right-wing blogger somewhere who is dying in the last ditch for the credibility of Armstrong Williams, but he hasn’t come to my attention. The unanimous chorus from this side of the blogosphere has chanted condemnations. I have just a few notes of my own to add.
First and most important, indignation over Mr. Williams’ acceptance of a quarter million dollars for promoting the No Child Left Behind Act should be matched with outrage at the Department of Education bureaucrats who decided that giving money to a talk show host in return for interviews on his program and favorable mentions in his syndicated column was a wise use of tax dollars. Even if there were nothing ethically problematic about the exercise, it was a patent waste of resources. Talk shows need sympatico guests to fill their air time; the purpose of opinion columns is to tell the world what the writer thinks about public issues. Why pay for what is being given away by the bushel?
Asking that question exposes the very likely motive for this sorry affair. The NCLB Act was one of President Bush’s excursions into liberalism, written with the cooperation of Teddy Kennedy and vastly expanding federal authority in the area of education. The only quarrel that liberals had with it during the election campaign, aside from its congenital defect of having been fathered by George W. Bush, was that not enough was being spent on programs of dubious efficacy. In brief, NCLB was not an initiative for which there was a great deal of enthusiasm among conservatives. (For a sobering assessment by two experts who are not unsympathetic to the act’s methods and goals but doubt that it can do much good in its present form, vide Chester E. Finn, Jr. & Frederick Hess, “On Leaving No Child Behind”.)
So it looks as if the Educrats found a conservative who didn’t share the Right’s generally negative attitude and “encouraged” him to praise NCLB, apparently in hopes of attracting support from his right-of-center audience. To Mr. Williams, whose day job is running a PR firm, it must have seemed like a plum contract: saying nice things about what he regarded as a deserving measure. Had he followed PR rules and disclosed his client, there would be no reason to criticize him. Of course, if he had closed a column with, “The preceding explanation of why the No Child Left Behind Act is an outstanding success was brought to you in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education”, the DoE might have felt that it wasn’t getting its money’s worth.
The Department of Education insists that the arrangement with Mr. Williams was legal, which may be the case, but it was stupid. The other party, to his credit, was quick to repent: “My judgment was not the best. I wouldn’t do it again, and I learned from it.” He followed up with An Apology to Readers on his Web site. Though the meae culpae, meae maximae culpae will not be humble enough for some, he at least shows far more sense of contrition than Dan Rather.
Various leftist bloggers view all this as a scandal outranking Mr. Rather’s retailing of clumsy forgeries as “news”. Certainly the Williams incident proves that the Right is not immaculate. It also demonstrates that it holds its own to higher standards than seem to prevail among its adversaries.
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