There’s a scene in The War Room, the 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign, that is replayed in the new CNN documentary about James Carville. George Stephanopoulos, flush with victory, starts telling the staff and volunteers crowded around him about the good things that will happen because they won. He mentions health care. He mentions jobs. And he says kids will get access to better schools.
It’s an unobtrusive line that stands out 30 years later. The reason: Better schools are no longer part of the basic litany of promises Democratic candidates make.
If you scroll over to Kamala Harris’s issues page, there’s plenty of programmatic detail, but look closely at the education section:
Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. She will strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class. And she’ll continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable, so that college can be a ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history, provide nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for almost five million borrowers, and deliver record investments in HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. She helped more students afford college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant award by $900 — the largest increase in more than a decade — and invested in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have led to over one million registered apprentices being hired, and she will do even more to scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college graduates.
Almost nothing........