Federal Judiciary

All about Sharron Angle -- By: Robert Costa

When Sharron Angle stepped into National Review?s boardroom on Monday, she wasn?t flanked by a phalanx of aides. It was just her; her husband, Ted; and a friend. They sat down, cracked open Diet Cokes, and began to chat. Sen. Harry Reid, we thought, would be the main topic of conversation. We all wanted to find out about how Angle, Nevada?s GOP Senate nominee, plans to topple the Senate majority leader come November. While we heard a lot about that, NR also learned a bit more -- about who Angle is, and why she?s running.

?I?m an accidental politician,? Angle says. Forty years ago, she recalls, two big things happened during her senior year at the University of Nevada, Reno: One, she married Ted, and two, she changed her academic focus from the fine arts to education. That education bug was reawakened eleven years later, in 1981, when her son, she says softly, ?failed kindergarten.?

?After he failed kindergarten, I put him back in for that second year and he was completely demoralized,? Angle explains. ?What I had was a six-year-old dropout. I knew that I needed to do something different for this kid, to kind of put him back on his wheels and get him started again. I decided to homeschool him.? As a trained teacher, Angle thought she could provide her son with a better environment, one where he wasn?t called a ?flunker? or ?too slow? by his classmates at the local public school. So Angle, a Southern Baptist, started what she calls an ?exempt Christian school? for likeminded families, a homeschool group for parents in Winnemuca, Nev.

Such a transition should have been easy. At the time, Nevada law allowed parents to homeschool their kids -- their call, end of story. So Angle thought. Then, the Wallace family, friends of the Angles? who decided to homeschool their kids as well, found themselves in hot water. The local school district caused a fuss, saying the children were truant and that they must enroll or be placed in foster homes.

?A judge said, ?I know it?s the law that you can homeschool in Nevada, but the law should be that you can?t, unless you live more than 50 miles away from the nearest school,?? Angle says, shaking her head at the memory. ?At that point, I realized that the government had interfered with my family. It was kind of like a mother bear and her cubs: Don?t get between me and my cubs, or you?ve got trouble.?

Angle and friends fought back. ?I went with 500 other people to push for a new homeschooling law in Nevada,? she says. ?That was my first encounter with the legislature.? As a result, during the 1983 legislative session in Carson City, assemblywoman Jane Ham introduced a bill to strengthen the state?s homeschooling law. The assembly?s education committee heard testimony from what Angle calls a ?who?s who? of homeschooling, including Dr. Raymond Moore, the man often dubbed the ?grandfather? of the homeschooling movement.

Ultimately, Ham?s bill died in the state Senate, but, thanks to the pressure of the homeschool moms, the state education board soon adopted new regulations more favorable to homeschoolers. While that welcome-to-politics moment convinced Angle that she ?needed to do something,? she spent the ensuing ten years raising her two sons, teaching, and staying involved in the community in nonpolitical ways. Throughout that time, however, she remained interested in policy, and in 1992, she ran for, and won, a seat on the Nye County school board. In 1998, Angle found herself back in Carson City, this time as an elected assemblywoman herself. She spent most of her time on the education committee, gaining notice for  tendency to vote ?no? on, well, most everything. She?d go on to serve four terms there, before retiring in 2006 to run, unsuccessfully, for a U.S. House seat.

Just before leaving the state legislature in 2007, Angle submitted various drafts of homeschool-freedom laws. Out of office, she paid a small fee to be a citizen lobbyist and helped shepherd one to passage. For her, it was a crowning career achievement, making it easier for parents to choose to homeschool while eliminating the requirement for homeschoolers to provide ?equivalent instruction? to that in the public schools. It also boosted the privacy rights of homeschooling parents.

Out of office, but still looking to be a voice for ?more freedom and less government,? Angle decided to run for the Senate. Her campaign was overtly unconventional in its presentation: No fuss, no gloss, just Sharron. Turns out, in Nevada at least, that approach works -- with, of course, a little help from the Tea Party Express and other conservative groups.

?I?ve seen government from many sides,? Angle says, smiling. ?Legislator, school board, citizen in the initiative process. I have a multifaceted background in education. I?ve done public-school teaching, private school, homeschooling, and tutoring for juvenile justice. I?ve taught adults at community college.? So when she says that she wants to dump the entire Department of Education, she comes across as a warm grandma who?s fought the beast, knows it, and detests it, not as some anti-government demagogue.

?Look, the Department of Education is a policy machine that sends down one-size-fits-all rules that fit no one,? Angle says. ?Education works best when you have all of the stakeholders involved and working toward the same commitment. That happens best at the local level. Anything bureaucratically, administratively, these layers and layers -- that just diminishes the involvement of the stakeholder. They feel like their voice isn?t being heard because there is too much of a loud clamor from the top.?

Harry Reid should be worried. According to the latest Rasmussen poll, he?s down eleven points to Angle, 50 percent to 39 percent. National Democrats, however, hardly seem flustered, and hope to tag Angle as a tea-party extremist, as some kooky cut-guv? grandma. Maybe that?ll work, but if Nevadans hear about Angle?s education journey, it?ll likely be Reid who gets schooled.

-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on June 16, 2010 (boomark / email).