In a New York Post story on how Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman are going to reconcile their differences on school vouchers (Al Won’t Be Voucher Grouch), there is a quote which perfectly sums up both Gore and many of the liberals (and conservatives) in Washington, DC:
If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner city school that was failing … I might be for vouchers, too.
Wow. My next door neighbor is very poor and has to send her children to the local public high school; she’d like to send them to a private school but she can’t afford it. How bad is the public school? Forty percent of students there fail the basic reading and math classes. Most students are reading at far below grade level.
While the teachers deserve a lot of the blame, many of the parents aren’t much help either. On any given day 1/3rd of the student body is absent. The discipline problems some of these unwanted and unsupervised kids cause is just a mess.
So, Gore admits, if he were in my neighbor’s position he’d want to be able to send his kid to a private school with vouchers. But he’s not in her shoes. He’s a wealthy liberal who sends his kids to an elite private school, so to hell with people like my neighbor. She’ll just have to teach her kid to read on her own.
Gore is, in fact, so knee-jerk ideologically opposed to the idea of anybody but people like him sending their kids to private schools that he even told a bald-faced lie about his own schooling. According to the Post:
At one point, Gore waxed nostalgic about a childhood education received inside the walls of Carthage Elementary School [Carthage, Tennessee].
Gore aides later clarified by saying the veep spent part of second grade at a Carthage public school, although his education was otherwise at an exclusive, all-boys private school in Washington, D.C.
It was okay for Gore’s wealthy, politically-connected father to send him to the best private schools available, just as it is okay for Gore to send his children to the best private schools in the country, but the moment the poor kid down the street wants to go to a private school to get away from his failing public school he becomes part of a right wing, “risky” scheme.
And this all from the party that claims it speaks for the working poor!