Douglas Alexander: “Mr. President, our former colleague Zell Miller was Lieutenant Governor of Georgia when I was a Governor. He was a…”

“Mr. President, our former colleague Zell Miller was Lieutenant Governor of Georgia when I was a Governor. He was a professor by profession and he was always interested in education and very skillful in education policy. Every Governor I know spends a lot of time trying to think of how we are going to recruit jobs. Well, if you study it, you learn after a while you don't recruit nearly as many as you grow. The way you grow them is with brain power. So the single best thing any State can do to create the largest number of good new jobs in that State is to keep the brightest kids at home. Governor Miller, when he was there, initiated the HOPE scholarship, which played a major role in attracting many of the brightest Georgia students, and I would say many of the brightest Tennessee students to come across the border to go to the University of Georgia, and then the residential school for math and science did the same. This legislation would permit every other State to do the same, and it is just one of the things it would do.”