Decline in public school enrollment and Iran’s potential threat to Biden’s presidency
Conservative: Tehran’s Threat to Joe’s Hopes
“If Joe Biden’s bid for re-election is thwarted, the spoiler may well be the Iranians,” quips The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. They foiled Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid in 1980, holding 52 US hostages through that election year and spotlighting his “impotence.” Inflation and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan helped. “Iran, Afghanistan and inflation” — does Biden “appreciate the irony?” He’s retaliating after Iranian proxies killed three US soldiers in Jordan, but will that “persuade Tehran to cease and desist”? Biden, like Barack Obama, has bet that if we engage the Iranians, we can “drag them to normalcy.” Yet “like Jimmy Carter, he is now getting a lesson that such regimes don’t behave normally because they have different priorities.”
From the right: Why Biden Won’t Strike Iran
President Biden won’t “go after the head of the snake and squash Tehran’s ability to fund and train the terrorists who continue to attack US personnel” as “he’s scared to death that hitting Iran’s oil fields or export facilities would drive global oil prices higher, and boost the cost of gasoline in the US,” argues Liz Peek at Fox News. “In an election year, he will do everything possible to make sure that doesn’t happen.” “Part of the reason oil prices globally have been fairly stable over the past year, and that gasoline prices in the US have held steady, is that Biden’s team allowed Iran’s exports to increase by half a million barrels per day,” “which “earned Tehran about $10 billion in extra revenues.”
Eye on NY: Public School Enrollment Drops On
“Enrollment in New York public schools this year sank to its lowest level since the early 1950s,” notes the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. The pre-K-to-12 total drop, “from 2.4 million in 2022-23 to 2.38 million,” was “concentrated in New York City where, despite the unexpected arrival of migrant children, enrollment fell.” Indeed, it has “trended down” since hitting “nearly 2.9 million in 1999-2000.” This reflects “both the size of the school-age population and decisions by parents,” with a “surge in homeschooling” as they “find alternatives to the public school system.” Expect more declines: “New York public schools this year have 155,049 kindergartners, 18 percent (34,779) fewer than 10 years ago.”
Election beat: Expect Endless Denialism
“Will either party candidate ever concede the outcome of the 2024 general election?” asks Rajkamal Rao at TIPP Insights. The issue exists thanks to Democratic operative Marc Elias’ “clever 2020 election maneuvering,” which guaranteed a huge surge in “the number of people who voted absentee in states that had little experience with no-excuse mail-in balloting.” As a result, “Trump led on election night 2020. But four agonizing days later, as mail-in ballots trickled in, the Associated Press declared Biden the winner.” Now “liberal states like California and New York” have loosened rules more, even as red states began “requiring voter ID, eliminating drop boxes, restricting no-excuse in-person absentee balloting” etc., producing “nearly flawless” 2022 primaries. Sadly: “Something as foundational to the American experience as elections has now become a victim of the Blue-Red divide. The other side will always question the outcome of elections.”
‘Disinfo’ watch: Suppressing Vote-Count Truth
At 4:52 a.m. on Nov. 4, 2020, New York Times reporter Reid Epstein tweeted from Wisconsin, “Green Bay’s absentee ballot results are being delayed because one of the vote-counting machines ran out of ink and an elections official had to return to City Hall to get more.” It was true, and the problem quickly rectified, reports Lee Fang at RealClearInvestigations. Yet it “prompted immediate and mostly successful speech suppression efforts by the Department of Homeland Security and others who were intent on undermining any facts or claims that might possibly be used to question the integrity of the 2020 election.” By 9:27 a.m., they’d gotten Twitter to suppress the tweet, so it “disappeared for most users” — which ironically fueled conspiracy theories about Green Bay’s vote.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
