The winners were announced recently in the Children s Scholarship Fund lottery. Parents of nearly one of three qualified students from New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. applied. That means support for choice is a deep as it is wide. It is an appealing issue to low income families, to black and Hispanic families which are victimized by indefensible public schools, and as Governor Jeb Bush of Florida has just shown, it can be a winning issue for conservative candidates and conservative governors. The common theme in all these concepts is of course individual liberty empowering individuals to choose for themselves the course they wish to follow and the policies they wish to adopt for their own families.
Individualism is a powerful idea, and a relatively new one in the history of the world.
Facts, as Ronald Reagan once said, are stubborn things. Ideas on the other hand, can be slippery. There are bad ideas, and good ones. Ideas ebb and flow at their own tempo. So when a leadership opportunity arises, we must seize the moment, for opportunities can be fleeting.