Politics & Power Quote by Ken Mehlman

The move here is to launder a contested national myth through the least controversial civic good: schooling. Mehlman frames the "American century" and the "American dream" not as accidents of geography or the spoils of power, but as outcomes of "very bold decisions" to widen access to "quality education". It is a flattering civics lesson with a strategic edge: if greatness came from public investment, then present-day anxieties about competitiveness, inequality, and social mobility can be answered with the same tool, without touching hotter fights over taxation, labor power, or redistribution.

The phrasing does quiet political work. "If you stop and think" invites assent by suggesting disagreement is just inattention. "At key points in our history" gestures at landmark expansions - common schools, the GI Bill, desegregation, maybe federal aid - while skipping the uglier truth that access was often universal in rhetoric and exclusionary in practice. That omission is the subtext: education is cast as the nation at its best, allowing the speaker to claim continuity with progress without naming the conflicts that forced it.

As a politician, Mehlman is also positioning education as a unifying moral investment rather than a battlefield. "Broad, universal access" signals fairness; "quality" reassures the meritocrats; "bold" supplies the romance of leadership. The intent is to make education spending and reform feel like patriotism - a safe, aspirational bridge between nostalgia and agenda, where the argument for policy arrives wearing the costume of national destiny.