The President Puts the “Suffer” in “Suffer the Children…”

Barack Obama will bore our schoolchildren for 18 minutes today with a speech wherein he will don his Big Government Daddy outfit and admonishes them to stay in school and work hard and other similar uplifting sentiments. The President apparently doesn’t know much about the attention span of the average school-aged child, which is surprising considering that he has two young daughters. Making a kid sit through a blah, blah, blah speech for 18 minutes is tantamount to your sitting through a two-hour business meeting at work.

Then again, I can’t quite remember where the President attended elementary or junior high school. Maybe they didn’t have Presidential addresses there so he has no misery of his own to remember.

Either way, the speech today is the anticlimax to the story. The real kerfuffle happened over this past week when parents, mostly on the right, pledged to take their kids out of school rather than subject them to more left-wing indoctrination.

The whole thing would have blown over pretty quickly if the White House had just released the speech a week ago so that we had more to see than just the instructions to teachers that went along with it. Plenty of people, myself included, objected to the rather Soviet tone of the supplemental educational material and expressed what we consider a healthy measure of distrust when the White House’s reply to our objections was “trust us”. It’s hard to trust a guy who has yet to keep a single campaign promise and whose big pledge not to raise taxes on the poor and middle class lasted about as long as a Twinkie in a Big and Tall Mens’ shop.

Still, the situation was salvageable, right up to the point where the White House ran out the oft-repeated talking point that any opposition to the President delivering a fatherly address directly to our schoolchildren was “silly”. Nevertheless, the administration changed the educational guidelines to remove the creeiper parts and spent a couple days explaining how all the other Presidents gave school speeches, too. By that point, though, the damage was done.

Of course, what the administration didn’t say, while it were criticizing a couple million parents who showed normal concern for the educational welfare of their children, is that after George H.W. Bush gave his speech in 1991, the Democrats launched a Congressional investigation and accused the President of misusing of public funds. That turned out to be nothing as well, but it does show that the outrage we saw from the right over this wasn’t exactly the worst we’ve seen.

What I really noticed most about this story, though, is that it fits this administration’s “gaffe template” almost perfectly. Here’s how the template looks:

1. The administration overreaches and tries to do something it can not or lacks the authority to do.
2. When called on it, the administration either lies about what it is doing or attempts to blame someone else for approving the attempt.
3. The Administration fixes the problem then either acts like it never existed or declares it a “distraction”.

This is almost exactly what happened with the school speech fiasco and it need not have gone as badly as it has. If the President had released the speech a week ago, along with a set of guidelines clearly labeled as a draft, this wouldn’t have been a story at all. Of course, that’s not what happened. The White House decided to run out the insulting and dismissive talking points. Worse, the responses came most loudly from Robert Gibbs, who is physically unable to give an empathetic and sincere explanation for anything. The White House reaction sounded like a blow-off, which made people even more angry.

In tennis, what happened to the Presdent this week is called an “unforced error”; in football it’s called “beating yourself”. No matter what you call this latest gaffe, it’s clear that they are becoming regular features of this administration.

Tags: Education, President Barack Obama