His speech next Wednesday to a joint session of Congress on health care reform may not be the most significant address President Obama delivers next week. Using the full resources of the federal government to go over the heads of parents and advise millions of public school children on how to conduct their lives is without precedent in American history. Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the Tuesday speech a “historic moment.”

Try as they might to portray the speech as a well-intentioned appeal to students to stay in school, study hard, and learn well, administration officials cannot avoid this central fact about the event – providing mass life-counseling to school kids is not what presidents are elected to do. So either the president does not understand what it means to be the nation’s chief executive, or the speech should be viewed as a trial run for something else.