Education Secretary Arne Duncan works to sell Obama administration's preschool initiative Duncan strode into an Atlanta preschool classroom, shook hands with Deal and joined the governor's wife, Sandra, in reading "Roar!" to some wiggly 4-year-olds. Duncan called Deal an "amazing leader" and praised Georgia's state-funded preschool program. He slipped in a reference to Deal's mother, a first-grade teacher, and even said he wanted Sandra to join him on the road. In the second term of the Obama administration, Arne Duncan is traveling to more locations than most other Cabinet members, save the secretary of state. With his plaid suit bag and his dark briefcase, the peripatetic Duncan is promoting an idea he says will improve millions of lives and strengthen the country. It's a different challenge for Duncan, who exploited luck and circumstance in the first term to carry out much of President Obama's education agenda without help from Capitol Hill. But now, Duncan needs Congress. In particular, he needs Republican lawmakers to approve $75 billion in new federal tobacco taxes to fund his early childhood education plan. To cultivate that support, Duncan, a one-time professional basketball player, is playing an "outside-in" strategy. He is reaching out to Republican governors, hoping they will help him persuade GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill to embrace the "Preschool for All" initiative. But it's a tall order for many Republican governors who are cool to the notion of new taxes. In recent weeks, Duncan has traveled to Michigan, Georgia and Virginia and plans to visit Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio and Minnesota. Those states already use state money to fund some preschool, and Duncan figures that offers a path in. "Governors get this because they have to deliver, they can't just talk," Duncan said in an interview on his way to the Atlanta school. Can you get Washington to be more functional? That's the challenge. If Duncan can succeed, he would deliver Obama a legacy-building victory that they believe could narrow the academic gap between poor and privileged children - a disparity that has budged little since it was first identified in 1966. "The average disadvantaged child comes to kindergarten a year to a year and a half behind other kids," Duncan said. And we spend all this time and money trying to catch them up. And we wonder why we have an achievement gap. With the time remaining in the Obama presidency, "this is the most important thing we could do," Duncan added. Hostility to tax proposal In many ways, it's hard for politicians to argue against the idea of helping small, wide-eyed children who leap with excitement at the alphabet song. But the dividends that come from preschool investment - higher rates of high school graduation and employment, lower rates of incarceration and teen pregnancy - don't materialize until years down the line, way past the next election. And the idea of funding preschool by nearly doubling the federal tobacco tax - from $1.01 to $1.95 per pack of cigarettes - is anathema to many Republicans.