Neal McCluskey
Cato@Liberty
8/27/2010
Yesterday, White House sources confirmed that President Obama will deliver another back-to-school address aimed at all of the nation’s children. That’s right, the president will make September 14 the second-annual Obama Day at your local school!
You might recall last year’s Obama Day, for which the U.S. Department of Education put out teaching guides that gave parents across the country reasonable cause to fear a day of liberal politics and celebrating President Obama. You might also remember the divisive national uproar that precipitated, which ultimately culminated in a relatively staid — but nonetheless campaign-esque — speech, not to mention a fair amount of after-the-fact sneering at people who either didn’t want public-school kids exposed to left-wing politicking or just wanted their kids, you know, left alone by the president. Finally, you might recall the May Parade magazine graduation “address” the president wrote that offered just the kind of profit-denigrating, “service” extolling rhetoric that people feared eight months earlier:
Of course, each of you has the right to take your diploma and seek the quickest path to the biggest paycheck or the highest title possible. But remember: You can choose to broaden your concerns to include your fellow citizens and country instead. By tying your ambitions to America’s, you’ll hitch your wagon to a cause larger than yourself. You can choose a career in public service or the nonprofit sector, or teach in an underserved school. If you have medical training, you can work in an understaffed clinic. Love science? You can discover new sources of clean energy or launch a business that makes the most efficient and affordable solar panels or wind turbines.
So will this year’s Obama Day be as controversial as the last installment? Probably not.
For one thing, unless the White House is not just wearing blinders, but living in a full-on isolation tank, it won’t authorize the release of any lesson plans to go with the talk. And if it does, it will scrutinize them, put them before focus groups, and torture them until they give up any and all material that could be even minutely controversial.
Second, while there is plenty of anger to go around right now, there’s been no burning summer of discontent like last year’s spree of town-hall conflagrations. It seems the growing ranks of fuming Americans are now more focused on ballot boxes than soap boxes.
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