“The damn law is ludicrous”

That's James H. Dillard II of Fairfax, Va., describing President Bush's signature education measure, the "No Child Left Behind Act."

Dillard is not some knee-jerk Bush-hater. He's a Republican state legislator, chairman of Virginia's House Education Committee. Like every other Republican in his state's House of Delegates, Dillard voted for a resolution seeking to exempt Virginia from NCLB:

By a vote of 98 to 1, the House passed a resolution calling on Congress to exempt states like Virginia from the program's requirements. The law "represents the most sweeping intrusions into state and local control of education in the history of the United States," the resolution says, and will cost "literally millions of dollars that Virginia does not have."

That's from this Washington Post report by Jo Becker and Rosalind S. Helderman, who also quote Scott Young, an "education policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislators" as saying "there is definitely a bipartisan backlash in the states" against Bush's education law.

Further evidence of this backlash:

As a result of a Republican legislative initiative in Ohio, the state commissioned a study released this month that found the federal government had significantly underfunded No Child Left Behind.

In North Dakota, a resolution sponsored by Democrats that stated the "cost to states of implementing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is as yet unclear" was passed by both the Republican-controlled House and Senate. And the Republican legislature in Utah is considering legislation to forgo the federal money and opt out of the program entirely.

President Bush has signaled that he expects NCLB to be a winning issue in his campaign for re-election. In his recent State of the Union address — which seemed to be a preview of his stump speech — he touted the law, one of his main domestic policy achievements, as a means of "opening the door of opportunity to all of America's children."

Yet a growing number of state legislators — including many from his own party — vehemently disagree. Look again at that vote from Virginia's House of Delegates: 98 to 1.

That suggests not only that this is a losing issue for the incumbent's re-election campaign, but that it's potentially a winning issue for the challenger.