What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Do you think it’s a good idea for the children of the president or the vice-president to attend a Washington DC public school? I’m not talking about them getting the best available education. I’m talking about the kind of concerns that the Secret Service has in protecting these children from kidnapping or assassination.
While it’s possible to secure a public school just as well as a private one, the bigger the school the harder the job. And it’s very disruptive to the other students. There are people who will pay a lot of money to give their children the opportunity to go to school with the Bush Twins or Chelsea Clinton or Malia and Sasha, but that’s a choice.
Sidwell Friends has been hosting presidential children going back to Teddy Roosevelt, and they have experience with it.
But it’s a big talking point on the right that those elitist Democrats don’t send their kids to school with the “inner city” kids and yet expect everyone else to use dysfunctional public schools.
Sen. Ron Johnson was only pursuing this well-trodden path. After all, he’s really concerned about those inner city kids and he wants to make sure they get a decent education. That’s why he went on a local radio show and made the following remark:
“It’s unbelievable to me that liberals, that President Obama, of course he sends his children to private school, as did Al Gore, and Bill Clinton and every other celebrated liberal,” Johnson said Monday on 1310 WIBA–Madison. “They just don’t want to let those idiot inner city kids that they purport to be so supportive of…they don’t want to give them the same opportunity their own kids have. It’s disgraceful.”
Oops, look at how that came out all wrong!
For starters, it’s logic salad. The implication is that the Clintons, Gores, and Obamas should pay the Sidwell tuition for every ghetto kid in the District. Why don’t they give those kids the same education that they give their kids?
We know that’s not what Sen. Johnson meant, but that’s what he said. And that’s pretty stupid.
He also called inner city kids “idiots,” which didn’t sound very nice. And I’m pretty sure the Sidwell Friends’ admission process screens for idiots, which presents an additional problem for Johnson’s critique.
Now, when the press started calling Johnson’s staff and asking them why Johnson had made this obnoxious and insensitive remark on the radio, at first they couldn’t believe that he’d actually said it. And when they realized that it was on tape, they called the senator out of an important hearing on Iran to talk to reporters at the Washington Post.
“Obviously I am a huge supporter of school choice, it infuriates me that these young inner city kids are trapped in poverty,” he told us. “I was being, that quote is, I’m being very sarcastic in that’s how liberals view these underprivileged kids. That is not my viewpoint in any way.”
But he said he understood how “hearing that little snippet” might make one “go, yikes.”
We asked him if he really believes liberals view inner city children as “idiots.”
“It wasn’t the best word,” he said. “Trust me I wish I would not have said that. That’s not what I mean.”
So, he muffed the delivery of this depressingly familiar talking point. We should all give him a mulligan, right. He was just being sarcastic. It came out all wrong.
If Russ Feingold turns this into a nasty campaign attack ad, he’ll be playing a game of Gotcha!
Except, even if Johnson had delivered this talking point flawlessly, it’s still a cheap shot.
There’s a point to be made in much more general and less personal terms about charter schools and school choice and whether Democratic policymakers are willing to use failing public schools for their own children. But that critique is grossly unfair when applied to the children of the president and vice-president, because there are major safety concerns.
So, once you decide to dumb everything down to score an an easy shot against your political opponents, you lose the right to ask for mercy in return.
Maybe it came out the wrong way. I willing to grant that it sounds worse than anything Senator Johnson intended to say. But he still should have to explain himself, over and over and over again.
Why?
Because that’s how he wants to play this game.
