One of my earliest memories of politics is the 1998 race for Georgia governor. That year, Zell Miller was term-limited and on his way out of office. A state senator who had opposed him in the 1992 Democratic primary named Roy Barnes squared off against Guy Millner, a Republican businessman who had run Miller to the wire in 1994 and again came up just short against Max Cleland in a 1996 Senate race.
I can still see and hear then-Governor Miller touting Barnes in a TV ad, saying his would-be successor was “solid as Stone Mountain,” and I can remember the pledges from both sides that the HOPE Scholarship was here to stay.
Sixteen years later, the cherished scholarship is again a campaign issue. Less than a week ago, the Georgia Republican Party launched a salvo against this year’s Democratic nominee, Jason Carter, arguing his plans for HOPE would ultimately lead to middle class families being deprived of the scholarship.
The roots of the attack are three years in the making. Taking office in 2011, Governor Nathan Deal was faced with an immediate problem, that being HOPE’s trajectory towards bankruptcy. Carter was a newly-minted state senator at the time, and he quickly asserted himself as the face of his party’s opposition to Deal’s proposed changes in the Upper Chamber.
A key pillar of Carter’s alternative was an income cap for the scholarship. Families earning over $140,000 a year would no longer be covered under HOPE, with the Democrat’s argument being it would preserve full tuition coverage for families who needed it most. Carter has pushed the idea since then, too, and his opposition to HOPE changes and Deal’s education policy at-large were central policy reasons for his entering the governor’s race to begin with.
It is that income cap that brought on the Georgia GOP’s attack. Deal’s campaign, and others, have argued that a $140,000 income cap would have done little in the way of staving off HOPE bankruptcy, as it would apply to just 6 percent of Peach State families. Thus, they contend that the income level would inevitably have to be lowered, shutting out more Georgians from HOPE.
Carter’s campaign team responded to the state party by calling it a “shameful lie” earlier this week. But later the same day, the candidate himself backed off his support of the income cap, saying it was “too blunt of an instrument” to use. Obviously, it was pounced on by GOPers as a flip-flop, to which Carter’s campaign cited a similar quote from earlier this year. He was running for governor then, too, and the back and forth goes on.
Now, however, former Governor and Senator Zell Miller has re-entered the fray. Deal’s campaign is out with a TV ad featuring the lifelong Democrat praising the 2011 changes and saying “thanks to Nathan, HOPE is available to the next generation.”
Most would agree that hearing Miller sign off on the HOPE changes undermine Carter’s credibility on the issue. How big of one is being and will be decided by the voters.
Either way, though, it is a testament to HOPE being woven into Georgia’s fabric as part of its identity that it remains a hot-button campaign issue, so many years after its creation.
