This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 18th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

John McCain has made a loud pitch on behalf of school choice to the N-Double A-C-P.

But he indicates that he believes the federal government should be actively involved in reforms of public

education.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cano Institute's Center for Educational Freedom,

takes the good with the bad.

In education, which was really the thrust of what he was talking about in addressing the

NAACP, the most important thing he said was was he was talking about and addressing the NAACP.

The most important thing he said was he said essentially that under his presidency he would seek

to make sure that anybody who wanted school choice could get it. As a matter of

principal that is an outstanding thing to say. It's about time that we had high

level, high profile politicians acknowledging that the basis for American education

should be the choice driven by parents, not what's best for the public school system or bureaucrats,

or some notion that we have to support public

schooling ahead of public education actually educating the public and so this was

a terrific at least rhetorically and in principle step forward.

There are however some problems with it.

Before we get to some of the problems that that poses, McCain is arguably putting Barack Obama in sort of a tough spot, in a sense

perhaps having to choose between two traditional democratic constituencies that is black parents and members of teachers unions and

advocates for the public education system.

Yeah well he's done something that's very smart. I mean this is the best

...