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August 31, 2010

Barack Obama's Education Secretary Urged Employees to Attend Al Sharpton Rally

Topics: Political News and commentaries

The official line from the White House on the Glenn Beck "Restoring Honor" rally was to completely ignore it, Cabinet Secretary Arne Duncan cajoled his staff to attend it, and sent an e-mail to more than 4000 Department of Education employees urging them to attend Al Sharpton's protest rally on the same day as Glen Beck's:

President Obama's top education official urged government employees to attend a rally that the Rev. Al Sharpton organized to counter a larger conservative event on the Mall.

"ED staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the "Reclaim the Dream" rally and march," began an internal e-mail sent to more than 4,000 employees of the Department of Education on Wednesday.

As Ed Morrissey points out, unlike the Beck rally, Sharpton's was explicitly political, and (highly) partisan:

"[Conservatives] think we showed up [to vote for Barack Obama] in 2008 and that we won’t show up again. But we know how to sucker-punch, and we're coming out again in 2010," Sharpton said.

Obama avoided comment on Saturday's dueling rallies, but Duncan took the podium alongside Sharpton and 30 other speakers on the football field of Dunbar High School. Thousands of mostly blacks listened -- and a lone man booed -- as Duncan called education "the civil rights issue of our generation" (Emphasis added)

Although the Washington Examiner thinks this isn't a violation of the Hatch Act, it likely comes damned close:

[...] Although the e-mail does not violate the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from participating in political campaigns, Education Department workers should feel uneasy, said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute.

"It sends a signal that activity on behalf of one side of a political debate is expected within a department. It's highly inappropriate ... even in the absence of a direct threat," Boaz said. "If we think of a Bush cabinet official sending an e-mail to civil servants asking them to attend a Glenn Beck rally, there would be a lot of outrage over that."

Russ Whitehurst, director of the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution's Brown Center of Education Policy, said nothing like this happened when he was a Department of Education program director from 2001 to 2008: "Only political appointees would have been made aware of such an event and encouraged to attend."

Officially, Sharpton's event commemorated the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

This, from the administration of our first "post-racial" president and the "most transparent ever'?

Had this occurred during the Bush administration and the Education Secretary had pushed a Conservative rally, the media would have gone beserk and the Democrats in Congress would have called for an investigation. But since this is the Obama administration pushing a liberal agenda, not even the slightest peep is heard, except from the Examiner.

Posted by Richard at August 31, 2010 12:25 PM

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