Model City

Today President Obama stopped in Cleveland and gave an almost hour long campaign speech about how President Bush and Republicans from 2001 to 2008 absolutely ravaged the country and that he just needs more time to get out of the mess they made.  Don't think about the fact that Obama was a member -- though largely a absent one -- of the Democratic majority in the Senate (Democrats held the House too).  Forget about the 2006 election.  But let's join Obama in his willful abandonment of taking any responsibility for what was done by Democrats on the federal level.  Let's look at that city that has had been enacting Democratic policies (though with one break) for the last forty plus years:  Cleveland.

Here's Kevin Williamson on Cleveland and what has been accomplished by Democrats without any opposition to speak of:

Like our investment in Solyndra, Cleveland spends but doesn’t have much to show for it. Its public schools spend about as much per student as it would cost to send them down the street to the tony University School, where 100 percent of the graduates attend a four-year college, many of them as National Merit scholars. But Cleveland’s schools, despite their spending, don’t get University School’s results, or even those of the more modest Benedictine high school, which spends about half what Cleveland’s public schools do and manages to send 96 percent of its graduates to college. Benedictine does this while operating its own busing system, incidentally.

Funny thing about Cleveland: It is every bit the distillation of urban dysfunction that Detroit is, but it doesn’t have Detroit’s mythic status as a lost city. Which means that Cleveland isn’t even all that good at being our crappiest/second-crappiest city. Hell of a backdrop, Mr. President.

Indeed.