In The Blogs

Helping the Prez

| Thu Sep. 3, 2009 8:44 AM PDT

In case you have better things to do with your life than trying to keep up with every outburst of political hysteria in the Age of Obama, here's the latest: the president announced yesterday that he would be giving a live speech to schoolkids next Monday, wherein he would extol the virtues of hard work, learning to read and cipher, etc. etc. Teaching materials related to the speech were provided by the Ed Department. Conservatives went predictably bonkers, accusing Obama of trying to brainwash our nation's youth, push his socialist agenda into the classroom, and create a cult of personality among impressionable children.

Today he backed off slightly:

In a set of bullet points listed under a heading, "Extension of the Speech," one of the points used to say: "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."

However, that bullet point now reads as follows: "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."

When conservatives started ranting about death panels, Mickey Kaus suggested that if Dems had any sense they never would have inserted the language about advance directives into their bill in the first place. They should have known it would cause problems. I disagreed: if it hadn't been death panels, it just would have been something else. There's no way to sanitize a bill enough to keep it safe from folks like Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin.

But I'm on the other side on this one. What the hell was Obama's brain trust thinking? The whole idea of the speech may have been misguided in the first place given the realities of modern hyperpartisan politics (be honest: you wouldn't have been thrilled if George Bush had done something like this), but including a bullet point asking kids "what they can do to help the president"? A five-year-old could have figured out that might cause a little bit of red-state heartburn.

Obviously the president shouldn't spend all his time worrying about what the lunatic fringe thinks. Still, the world is what it is. Why give them obvious ammunition?

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Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.

Comments

I do agree

Submitted by optical weenie on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 8:57 AM PDT.

that the earlier phrase was dumb. I guess folks at Dept of Ed seemed to have forgotten JFK's great phrase - ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. If only they had just asked the kids what they thought they could do for their country.

But is it as dumb as the republicans now saying that they are going to keep their kids out of school on Sept 8?

Not In Front of the Kids ...

Submitted by LaurieMic (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 2:14 PM PDT.

When I was a kid, we were taught to respect the Office of the President of United States. We were taught that regardless of what we think of any one holder of that office, we must still respect the office. I worry that kids aren't being taught this anymore. And I worry about the impact this has or will have on the ability of our government to govern, serve and protect us.

It's never been easy to be a kid, but it must be more confusing now than ever. I'm sad and ashamed that we seem to be giving our children less and less to trust, hope for and believe in. Instead of teaching kids to be selfish, negative and cynical, we should be teaching them the joy of good citizenship and being part of something bigger than themselves. We should teach them that if they work hard, get good grades and always take the high road, they can do and be anything they want. We should teach our kids that other people matter and that even when we disagree, we should treat each other with respect.

Disrespecting and vilifying President Obama as some kind of boogey man that isn't fit to talk to our school children is a terrible, shameful lesson for children. But there is one thing about it that gives me some hope and a bit of a chuckle. We all know that the more you tell kids they shouldn't watch or listen to something, the more they want to watch or listen to it. I keep thinking of the movie Dirty Dancing, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner!"

One way or another, "Baby" is going to hear the President's message.

I'm sure that the question

Submitted by Jangler NPL (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:08 AM PDT.

I'm sure that the question is completely innocuous in the context of the speech, which I'd wager at one point included some sentence like "I want America to thrive and prosper, and you can help me out by doing your homework and listening to your teachers." In other words, it was probably a pure listening comprehension question. But now the same hypothetical sentence would probably read "You can achieve your educational goals by doing your homework and listening to your teachers." Or something.

Bonus hyperventilation point: the original bullet-point contains the word "redistribute". ZOMG!

George Bush did do something like that

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:13 AM PDT.

He did an address directly to schoolchildren about - ahem - literacy and reading.

gimme a break...

Submitted by Varecia on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:19 AM PDT.

I don't know if they have it anymore, but the Eurolegal Services website used to have huge treatment dealing with the neoconservative's agenda for the entire country, beginning with (if memory serves) the Powell Memorandum, and including the neocon's strategy for infiltrating universities by placing far right professors in endowed departmental chairs. And this little, very benign civics exercise by U.S. Dept. of Education is getting slammed? See how *well* the right wing nut jobs in this country have trained EVERYONE, including, apparently, apologists on the left?! There is NOTHING wrong with the classroom activities the Dept. of Ed created--it's about academic performance, not policy advancement!!! NO APOLOGIES, NO EXCUSES!

I agree

Submitted by scott1959 (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:32 AM PDT.

When I first heard the uproar, I thought it was silly... we have had other presidents address the kids. But then I read the bullet point and it is worded very poorly, and does play right into the lunatic fringe. A better job could have been done on this.

Seems reasonable enough to me

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:35 AM PDT.

Actually the original question was better. A personal appeal to "help the president" is a more tangible assignment then the wifty new language.

The old assignment suggested that kids were working together with the president to help improve literacy. The new assignment is touchy-feely introspective bullshit.

I disagree: This speech

Submitted by txbubba (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:39 AM PDT.

I disagree: This speech addressed to kids is wholly appropriate, an opportunity that Obama should take advantage of.

Minority students drop out nearly double the rate of Anglo students. A minority president urging kids to stay in school and taking the opportunity to address them (not their parents) is the kind of leadership we need.

The nutjobs are going to go nuclear over anything Obama does. To let them modify his behavior, to limit what influence and opportunities he uniquely brings as a minority president is irresponsible.

I also disagree about Bush addressing my kids: if I knew that he was going to emphasize school and working hard or avoiding drugs (a teaching moment that Bush blew), I would have had no problem with that.

I really despise hypothetical arguments, though, because they are unprovable. Unfortunately, hypothetical argument is all that the right has done for years.

Yes, if Bush had done the

Submitted by thersites on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 9:48 AM PDT.

Yes, if Bush had done the same thing I might have been displeased.
but I wouldn't have had to drive to work this morning listening to pinheads on my radio shriek at me about it.
(Yeah, I know. Change the station. But in the morning my blood pressure is dangerously low.)

"But then I read the bullet

Submitted by mark robbins (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 10:11 AM PDT.

"But then I read the bullet point and it is worded very poorly, and does play right into the lunatic fringe"

Honestly I consider myself a part of a fringe of my own creation, and I still find this offensive.

How about not phrasing things in a way that insults the intelligence of your intended audience, and is framed in a way that assumes a submission to elected authority?

The fact is that people think that way, and this illustrates it. You can't write that without presuming that elected officials are worth listening to.

More to the point it's part of a larger problem in any kind of "education" it's a question which presumes its answer. In which case, why bother asking the question?

Holy shit you couldn't pay me enough money to send my kids to a school that read any of that memo and said "good idea!".

"Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals." And this is so broad as to be totally ridiculous. How about the prez just leaves the ditto sheets to the educators who's job it is to come up with this stuff? And we can all go back to pretending that our kids get helped more than damaged by the millions of dollars we spend 'educating' them.

I'm a big enough boy to

Submitted by B on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 10:17 AM PDT.

I'm a big enough boy to understand the presumption (in writings like this) that the President is trying to do generic good things for the country -- whether its Obama or Bush.

The presumption that the president's goals are to win re-election, put his opponents in jail, and force ideological policy ideas down the throats of school children is a new one. I fully support the idea of going back to the old naive concepts, if for no other reason than to eventually break the hold of ultra-partisanship, jaundice, and sarcasm on politics when these kids grow up.

Bush and Reagan did do this

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 10:30 AM PDT.

Bush and Reagan did do this Kevin. Keep up, man.

Cult of Personality

Submitted by buddy66 on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 10:58 AM PDT.

''Help our Glorious Chairman'' or ''El Commandante'' or ''Der Fuehrer.''

Somebody should be fired — or sent to the gulag.

What were they thinking?

Submitted by K Ashford (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 11:28 AM PDT.

But I'm on the other side on this one. What the hell was Obama's brain trust thinking?

With all the daily communications going out from the executive branch every day, the "brain trust" wasn't responsible for this arguably bad language. Probably some low-level Dept. of Education flunky.

Let's not play into the right-wing hysteria, for they know as well as we do that the language didn't come from the top. They would have the masses believe that Obama and/or Emmanuel wrote it, that this is part of some grand design to indoctrinate our kids, etc.

And to be honest, I wouldn't have gone THAT ballistic if Bush had done it, especially when in the context of his greater sins

This whole shit just belies

Submitted by Another Brad (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 12:29 PM PDT.

This whole shit just belies a mentality pervasive among all presidents, but especially Obama, that his words carry some kind of magical powers. Elected officials should listen to the electorate, not the other way around. The cult of the Presidency and respect for the State is taught by government schools at a very young age, and takes a long time to remove, if ever. The first thing I thought of when I read this Ed memo is that I will never, come hell or high water, send my kids to public schools.

This isn't the first time a

Submitted by Campesino (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 1:09 PM PDT.

This isn't the first time a president has addressed U.S. public school students, and it's not the first time there've been accusations of politicization, either. President George H.W. Bush gave a similar talk in 1991, PolitiFact notes. At the time, then House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt said, "The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students." (As PolitiFact also notes, Newt Gingrich defended Bush's speech.)

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/09/02/obama_indoctrination/p...

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy

Here in Evansville, IN, we

Submitted by macleodcartoons on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 3:54 PM PDT.

Here in Evansville, IN, we just got a phone message from the school corporation saying that since the speech was at lunch hour it would be replayed for students the next day, but if any parent objected they could send in a note and their student would be excused from listening. What do you think of that? Would they have done that for any other president? I think not.

Yes, but. . .

Submitted by smitisan on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 6:03 PM PDT.

Sorry, but all the pontificating aside, I don't see anything wrong with the Prez asking kids to think about what they could do to help him. Give the kids some credit, and maybe some of them will come up with some ideas. I'm just damn tired of having to run everything through Peoria, which I'm sure has some good folk in it.

"You signed the papers. You wanted to be here!" -Drill Sgt. Leach, 1971

it is sad to see everything

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Sep. 3, 2009 6:43 PM PDT.

it is sad to see everything in this country break down into republican/democrat s--t. too bad no one asks the question why is obama even wasting energy like this when we need single payer system right now. instead of supporting his own democrats in congres ie john conyers bill hr 676 for single payer for all he is wasting time trying to brainwash our children with what ever corporate america/ wall st. and goldman sachs wants them to be brain washed and pushing instead hr3200 a bailout for big pharma, wellpoint and the banksters in the end while raiding medicare blah blah blah, does no one care anymore. obama is a puppet for corporate america and i ain't no right wing republicrat. lincoln you say mr obama, I say you have a long way to go...

The nuts are seriously

Submitted by Tilli (Mojave Desert) (not verified) on Fri Sep. 4, 2009 12:41 AM PDT.

The nuts are seriously harshing my mellow.

People should be ashamed of themselves!

Submitted by Marta (not verified) on Fri Sep. 4, 2009 12:21 PM PDT.

I cannot believe the people who are teaching their children to not only disrepect the President, but to be afraid of him. The parents are teaching hate and it's beginning to reek of racism! I can't remember when I've seen such hateful, disrepectful, and riotous treatment of a President. We are being set back a 100 years! Children need to be shown that the President is a good, honest man. Maybe he doesn't always believe the way you do, but that he is here to lead your country and do the right thing. To teach children to fear him -- and this is coming from so called "Christians?"

Drum and you other appeasers are as worthless as the wingers

Submitted by evano (not verified) on Fri Sep. 4, 2009 4:18 PM PDT.

To hell with the Republican loons and to hell with so-called "progressive" wimps like Mr. Drum and so many other moron commenters here. The President of the US is the President of ALL of the US. What the fuck is wrong with you people -- right and left -- that you get the heebie-jeebies about the President speaking to the kids of the nation?

Are the values you've taught your children so fragile that listening to a speech by someone you may not agree with is going to damage the kids forever? If so, then your kids are fucked up already, and one more speech isn't going to change that. Are you teaching your kids to be the next generation of hyper-partisan assholes who can't take the chance of being exposed to another viewpoint? What the fuck kind of progressive are you?

And Drum: what do you think we should do, run every speech past the barely literate teabaggers for prior approval and bipartisan support? Yeah, that's working so well in Congress, isn't it? It's not the content of his speeches these drooling microcephalics are opposed to: it's the color of his state and the color of his skin, stupid! No amount of editing is ever gonna change that.

Progressives need to stop appeasing these assholes already! Where are your spines? Where are your guts? Continually kowtowing to their half-baked brainfarts makes you just as complicit in the destruction of our society as they are. They are not interested in American democracy. They are not interested in compromise. They are not interested in reason or logic. Let them keep their kids out of school; education was obviously wasted on their parents. It didn't do any good in preparing them for life in a complex, multicultural, multi-idea, modern society.

The more I see this irrationality and superstition from the right, and this misguided belief from the left that the mindless utterances of the dittoheads have some validity, the more I fear that the only way out of this social quagmire is going to require bullets and blood.

The commonwealth requires

Submitted by Anonymous jona (not verified) on Sat Sep. 5, 2009 10:29 AM PDT.

The commonwealth requires two things to be elected. One a clear majority, and two a correct programme. Obama has one and a half of these requirements, and the majority needs to keep moving so the programme gets implewomented. One man cannot be totally blamed if the masses do not move to put into being the new necessary program. His end torture, end agressive war and bring the troops home , relies on the American people doing just that--implementing the program. When the bottom moves the top can follow. If everyone sits back and snipes at the top position nothing gets done. This all goes to prove that the people are the makers of history and herstory. End pollution wars, not endless wars for more pollution. Thats the work of the day and the need for the administrations success, as the problems of climate change as CO2 unbreathablity is really facing all the peoples.

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