Another View on Obama's School Speech

hanks to Dan for another stint at Prawfs. Paul Horowitz raises the interesting question of the reaction to the President's upcoming speech to school children. I see it a bit differently.

I am certainly a political conservative, but I have no objection to the President addressing school children and talking about the importance of education. Indeed, I think that an African American President addressing poor and minority children on the value of education could be a powerful and positive message. I have no problem with the President using his bully pulpit for that.

But, in a world in which the next campaign begins as soon as the last vote is counted, it does not surprise me that a President's unprecedented choice to address a captive audience of millions of school children would create controversy. I think there would be have been much the same reaction if George W. Bush (who a number of people seemed to consider a theocratic fascist war criminal) had proposed the same thing. In fact, when George H.W. Bush addressed students at a D.C. school in a live broadcast that schools across the nation were encouraged to show to students, Democrats cried foul.

In our country, the President is the head of state but he is also a politician. When he wishes to invoke his status as the head of state and ask the rest of us to put politics aside, he must put it aside as well. In the context of a speech to school children, this means avoiding references to disputed matters of policy and the President's agenda - even at the simple level that one would use to speak to school children. It means avoiding the slogans of his campaign. It means that the speech cannot be about the President himself.

Many conservatives don't trust the President to do this. Part of the reason for that is our political culture in which we routinely assume either bad faith or ignorance on the part of our opponents. (We see that in one response to Paul's post calling reaction to the President's speech "racist.") Part of it is that conservatives, fairly or not, have come to see the President's eternal campaign (and all Presidents have them) as rooted more in personality and the elevation of the person of the candidate than has generally been the case in American politics. We can, depending on our perspective, lament, dispute or sympathize with these reasons for the negative reaction of many to the proposed speech.

But part of the reason is the administration's own fault. Lesson plans that called on children to write to the President about how they could "help him" either played into the hands of conservative critics or created anxiety in the minds of those who would otherwise not have been concerned.