Due to an agreement with the Rotary Club of Jacksonville, former U.S. attorney general and Florida gubernatorial hopeful Janet Reno couldn’t talk politics at her appearance before the group at the Omni Monday.
Due to the state of the nation and the war-time unity behind President Bush, she can not effectively criticize the President’s brother, Jeb, who happens to be her opponent should she win the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.
Reno, however, remains steadfast in her pursuit of the office, even if it means tip-toeing around groups like the Rotary and even Presidents’ brothers. Monday, she managed to do both while still hitting hard on the campaign issue of education.
“I think if we’re to say that there is no time for politics, it risks hurting our democracy, which is based on the political electoral process,” she said following her speech. “And if we let that be hampered, I think we will let the bad guys win.”
In her speech, Reno declared that everyone needs to “stand behind our President as one nation united. He has such a staggering job at this particular time and it requires that we all be together to do everything possible to see these people are brought to justice; to see that our freedoms are maintained, and that we work together to give him every one of the tools that are necessary to do that.
“With that though, I think it is important to ask what we can do and what must be done here in the state of Florida. I think it is important that we take this unity that the whole country feels, this spirit that brings us together, and address what we can do locally to ensure our security, to ensure our safety.”
To do this, she said, federal, state and local agencies need to work as one and use technology to its utmost. But, borrowing a page from President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech, she said the nation needs to “make sure the people behind the technology master it, rather than letting technology rule us.”
Hence, education.
“Something is wrong in a nation – and this is true even in Jacksonville – that pays football players in six- and seven-digit figures and pays school teachers what we pay them,” Reno said. “Somehow we’re going to have to focus on how we put teachers first.”
Afterward, she admitted she criticizing the State’s pay for teachers.
“When I compared it, I was making reference specifically to Florida,” she said. “And I think Florida has, for a major state, one of the lower average salaries for teachers, and I would like to see us be competitive with every state in the nation and have the best educational system in the nation.”
In fact, during her speech, she challenged each person “to take the spirit of unity that exists in our nation today and focus our efforts in Florida on building the best educational system in this country, bar none. That will prepare our citizens for the difficult tasks that lie before us. We need to make sure that every person is as prepared as they can be to fill the jobs that maintain businesses as first-rate businesses and this country as the greatest nation in the world.”
Asked about Reno’s football player/school teacher pay analogy, Super Bowl Host Committee president and mayoral candidate Mike Weinstein said he thought is was more of a symbolic statement that one specifically aimed at football players or entertainers.
“She spoke symbolically about where we have placed teachers in our system of priorities as far as compensation and whether being a teacher in the public system is looked at as the highest career you can go to, when in reality it is one of the most important careers anyone can ever choose,” he said. “But in the compensation package, it doesn’t have that same reflection. That’s what the attorney general was referring to. I don’t think she was trying to relate to any one particular comparison.”