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Resistance to Obama’s School Speech [Updated with Pink Floyd]

By pm317 on September 7, 2009 at 5:01 PM in Current Affairs

The controversy over President Obama’s planned address to U.S. public school children next week shows no signs of abating. In fact, in some places, it’s heating up.

Remember during the Democratic primaries, how many said their children wanted them to vote for him. In keeping with his community organizing training, Obama’s pattern has been to bamboozle the most vulnerable citizens. He went after the youth. And some of their parents fell in line. Do you remember this video from last year?


By all accounts, this school speech should not have been a problem. Ronald Reagan did it, the elder Bush did it. But why the resistance to Obama? And contrary to the media lapdogs saying it is all conservatives, I think there is resistance from a lot of different quarters. The media and Obama’s handlers made up this humongous marketing campaign and they are still in it. The supporters in their drunkenness are still perpetuating the cult of personality theme enough to scare a parent.

There was a pied piper like quality to Obama’s election campaign. There was no vetting, no hard questions, accept everything, and ignore the lies and the obfuscation. What do we really know about this man, the president of the free world? Why are his transcripts sealed? Why is there a one-page medical report? I won’t even say the B word but there are so many things that we don’t know and the media didn’t ask. I think the media shenanigans of last year are finally catching up. It is ironical that they thought they were helping him but does not appear to be so.

The tea parties, the town hall eruptions about his health insurance reform, and now the resistance to his what would have otherwise been an innocuous speech are all indications of a bigger problem Obama is encountering. A problem mostly caused by how his minions and supporters have behaved over the course of his election. A problem caused by his lack of candor and lack of transparency in telling us who he is and what he stands for.

I can understand the mistrust of the people resisting his speech but what I don’t understand is the stupidity of Obama and his handlers. They have not explained to the people the rationale for why that speech to the children and why now. “Oh, he wants to inspire them” is not enough. Parents are not just going to give up control of their children to someone they don’t trust, even for a couple of hours. Obama should get back to governing and leave the inspiration hullabaloo to parent-approved life coaches. Maybe if he demonstrates success for what we hired him to do, namely policy and governance, parents and others will perhaps look up to him on other matters.

UPDATE: When I wrote this piece last week, the speech was not yet available. Hotair has a good critique of the speech and also a comparative analysis with Reagan’s and the reaction to Bush’s (41) from the Democrats.

Here is Ed Morrissey of Hotair:

[snip]
I think the White House and Obama fouled this up from the beginning, making it look much more political than necessary, and gave their critics a boatload of ammunition with which to attack them. The speech, included in its entirety below, turned out to be entirely innocuous. But by asking teachers to impress upon children the need to “help President Obama,” they made it look blatantly political. They seem to have forgotten that they’re the public servants, and that the people do not live to serve political masters. As Frank Wilson puts it in another context, Americans see themselves as citizens, not subjects, with the President only of a higher rank for the temporary period of time that we put him there. This has been incompetently handled from beginning to end, including the highly embarrassing scheduling that inadvertently excluded millions of students from the speech.
[snip]

Update II: I’ve run the speech through a word frequency counter and found the following results:

* 56 iterations of “I”
* 19 iterations of “school”
* 10 iterations of “education”
* 8 iterations of “responsibility”
* 7 iterations of “country”
* 5 iterations each of “parents”, “teachers”
* 3 iterations of “nation”

In other words, Barack Obama referenced himself more than school, education, responsibility, country/nation, parents, and teachers combined. And to think that people accused Obama of self-promotion!

UPDATE from Larry Johnson–Need to end this excellent article with some Pink Floyd: