Last week, I told you that Pat McPherson, who represents the Omaha area on the Nebraska State Board of Education, touched off a firestorm with the discovery of horribly racist posts on his blog, “Objective Conservative.” Among other things, they called President Obama a “half-breed.” McPherson has denied making these posts and admits that he didn’t adequately monitor the blog’s content. He has also shuttered the blog. However, he refuses to admit who wrote the offensive posts. In the face of calls from across the spectrum for him to resign, including from Governor Pete Ricketts, McPherson insists he will stay on because–wait for it–if he resigns, he’ll be admitting he’s a racist when he really isn’t one.
McPherson became even more isolated last night, when his own colleagues joined the growing chorus demanding that he step down. The board voted 6-2 to adopt a resolution calling for his resignation, with only McPherson and Glen Flint voting against it. The Omaha World-Herald obtained a copy of the resolution. Read it here. It says that the “storm of attention and outrage” from the blog’s “racist, demeaning and derogatory” posts will make it impossible for the board to do anything productive, and notes that board members have received numerous “expressions of no confidence” in McPherson’s ability to “effectively serve all of Nebraska’s children.”
McPherson isn’t backing down one inch. He read a prepared statement reiterating both his refusal to resign and his denial that he’s a racist. He blamed the demands for his resignation on “political interests” who opposed his campaign for the board, such as the state teachers’ union and the state Democratic Party. Those interests, he said, have intimidated elected officials into demanding his resignation lest they be tarred as racists themselves. He asked his opponents to show “a spirit of forgiveness” and give him a chance to serve. That statement didn’t sway the leader of the effort to oust McPherson, University of Nebraska professor Patrick Jones. To Jones’ mind, McPherson’s statement showed his only interest was “self-preservation and not the greater good.”
In response, board president Rachel Wise launched an education policy review that, among other things, will determine if board members should be held to the same ethical standards as teachers. While the current code of conduct for teachers states in no uncertain terms that discrimination of any form is not acceptable, the board’s code deals mainly with staying informed and being courteous to other board members. The message was clear–if McPherson had been a teacher in any Nebraska school district that didn’t have its collective head up its collective rear end, he’d have long since been gone.
As I mentioned last week, Ricketts, the editorial board of the Lincoln Journal Star and the Omaha and Lincoln chapters of the NAACP were among the many voices last week who demanded McPherson step down. They’ve since been joined by both of Nebraska’s U. S. Senators, Deb Fischer and Ben Sasse, as well as the Omaha school board, the Omaha city council, and the editorial board of the World-Herald. It should be noted that Fischer and Sasse are two of the most conservative members of the Senate, Ricketts is a staunch conservative from a very conservative family, and both the World-Herald and Journal Star tilt conservative editorially. So much for McPherson’s claims that this is a partisan hatchet job.
As hard as it may be to believe, there are actually some people who support McPherson. Doug Kagan, a member of a local tea party group, claimed that McPherson is the target of a “witch hunt”–more or less echoing McPherson’s claims in his prepared statement. Paul Meyer, a member of the school board in Millard, a neighborhood of Omaha, called the vote “a bunch of B. S.” For the most part, though, McPherson is almost completely isolated–and he brought that on himself. Even if you buy his claim that he didn’t make those disgusting posts, he himself has admitted to not exercising the most basic oversight over his blog, and refuses to admit who made the posts. Those factors are by themselves enough to demand that he go–and go now. I’ve started a petition calling for McPherson to resign. Sign here.
