Warning: This post will use the "V-word" so if that is a problem for you, this may be a good time to go get your nails done or get that massage or something.
"You do what's right for the kids." — Barack Obama. Read on…
So The Obamanator has taken his "Yes We Can" tour to Favreville, or as some maps still insist on calling it, Wisconsin. And he decides to sit down with the editorial board from my old stomping/scribbling ground, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And the editors, who know how to take a local issue and use it to squeeze some substance out of a guy like The Obamanator, decide to ask him about Milwaukee's groundbreaking private school voucher program. (In framing the question, one editor notes the political contours of the debate, i.e. it is a program that is very popular with low-income parents but, uh, not so much with the teachers union, whose members earn too much to qualify for a voucher. OK, the editor didn't mention that last part but my fingers couldn't help moving around on the keyboard.)
Because I used to be completely immersed in writing about the politics of vouchers in Milwaukee, I have studied pretty closely over the last 18-years as politicians have swung through Brewtown and offered their thoughts on the program. I watched Bill Clinton do the NEA Two-Step Backtrack after sending Democratic Assemblywoman Annette "Polly" Williams a letter congratulating her on her leadership with the original voucher law for Milwaukee in 1990. (He fretted in the letter that the "traditional Democratic party establishment" hadn't given her more encouragement.)
I watched Democratic candidates like Al Gore pander to the NEA by voicing steadfast oppostion to vouchers, only to see him concede later that if he was a parent of a child in the kind of non-functioning public schools we're talking about, then hell, yeah, he'd be a voucher user.
And just as bad, I watched Republican candidates gush with support for vouchers without any sort of nod to the complexities that attach themselves to a program that is obviously loaded with them – i.e. what exactly do we do with the public school system once we let people vote with their feet, especially since history has proven in Milwaukee that a vast number of parents who choose schools for their kids do in fact choose public schools. (Also, I watched them pretend they would fight for poor parents even though, in hindsight, the only fights they were really imagining were overseas.)
So when I watched the 6-minute video of Obama's answer to the question, I was struck by something. In the long history of the "voucher soundbite" from politicians, Obama may have provided one of the most interesting answers I've ever heard.