It’s not a stretch to suggest a connection between Barack Obama, Gordon Campbell and school meetings Tuesday in the Mission and Lake Country that may turn angry.

The link is taxes, and the impossibility of the public having less of them and more of everything else that the public wants.

The Democrats took what Obama admitted was a “shellacking” in the U.S. midterm elections last week.

Two years after his messiah-like arrival at the White House, he lost the House and a hunk of his support in the Senate. Obama had a hard time getting his legislation through when he had majority control. For the next two years, he will walk, talk and quack like a lame duck.

The unpopularity of his health care plan had much to do with the downfall. It will surprise most Canadians to know that a large majority of Americans - 85 per cent - had health care plans before the Obama legislation. They cared about their jobs, not the other 15 per cent without health care. What Obama didn’t get - or didn’t care about - was the line made famous by Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

But there was another big issue that wounded Obama. His predecessor, Dubya, had brought in tax cuts. They were suppose to expire soon and Obama said he would allow that. Whoops.

The single issue that left Campbell with a nine per cent approval rating was the HST. Although Campbell tried to buy back the voters by announcing a cut in personal taxes, it was too late. As radio commentator Bill Good put it: “Campbell was a dead man walking.”

The HST is so poisonous it would appear to doom any successor who doesn’t state clearly that, if elected, the tax is dead.

Back home for the connection is the introduction of day-long kindergarten next fall. It means overcrowding at some elementary schools. The board plans to address that by putting Grade 7s in the Mission and Lake Country into high schools a year earlier than normal.

Mixing Grade 8s with Grade 12s has obvious perils for the young kids. Putting Grade 7s in with Grade 12s - along with the drugs, alcohol and cigarettes - is an alarming safety issue for kids.

I was watching a group of high school kids hanging out at McDonalds while I waited for a drive-thru order to be brought out to my car.

I thought: “Most of those girls are dressed like little hookers. What are their parents thinking? What good parents want their Grade 7s in that mix? ”

Said a mother of a Grade 6 student: “They say there will be appropriate physical separation from the high school student body. What they are really saying is that my daughter and others in her class will be used as guinea pigs.”

Always anxious to hide reality behind bafflegab, the school district is referring to the plan as “a middle school within a high school model.”

Model schmotel, I say. The meetings with parents on Tuesday are for more double talk, although it sounds like the parents aren’t buying it.

What’s needed are stand alone-middle schools in each area, both at some distance from the high schools.

That will require, guess what? More tax revenue.

The HST was a necessary tax.

Bush’s tax cuts played a role in a miserable debt situation in the U.S. and the effect it had on blanketing a recession on the rest of the world.

Canadians hated the GST but it has been a fundamental part of our relatively stable economy.

You can’t have it both ways.

I don’t think anti-HST crusader Bill Vander Zalm has ever let wisdom interfere with whatever blind ambitions are on his mind.

The blind have followed the blind.