Unlikely Pair

The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Cynthia Tucker and the Hoover Institution's Michael Finn.

Tucker:

Cynthia TuckerVoting Rights Act: I was wrong about racial gerrymandering
...
Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or –brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.
...
As Richard Harpootlian (cq), chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, told me: “When the only issue is race, idiots win, black and white.”

Finn:

...Particularly lamentable is to see academic standards for fourth graders turn into a “tea party” issue that’s used to bludgeon GOP office holders to repudiate a sound reform out of fear that they’ll be clobbered from the right during the next Republican primary. (One sorry outcome of both parties’ twenty-year quest for “safe” legislative seats is that nearly all of today’s credible electoral challenges come from the fever swamps and fog banks within the parties.)

The thrust of Finn's piece is that grassroots conservative activists are wrongly opposing a voluntary set of educational standards that was developed in a federalist spirit.