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.
Viewed in the context of the Obama administration’s proliferating plans to expand the federal government’s reach much further into the everyday lives of Americans – as in Byron York’s story Thursday on washingtonexaminer.com about how Obamacare will expand the IRS – that something else could be setting a precedent for future speeches on other, more explicitly political purposes. Two come immediately to mind – environmentalism and multiculturalism. These topics are already firmly cemented into the typical public school curriculum, and both lend themselves to calls for follow-up actions by students from the president, reinforced in the classrooms after the speech by his legions of “progressive” supporters from the ranks of the teachers unions. We are now getting a clearer idea of what union president Reg Weaver and Obama had in mind last year when they enthusiastically agreed to “partner” the White House and the NEA, using your tax dollars.
Equally worrisome here is the “Dear Leader” aspect of the president’s speech to public schools students. A speech by the nation’s leader exhorting students “to get focused and inspired for the new school year” would not be surprising in Havana, Caracas or Pyongyang. In Washington, D.C., however, it properly sets off all kinds of alarm bells. That is why thousands of parents are telling Talk Radio hosts and Internet web sites that they will be keeping their kids home next Tuesday. Such reactions caused the White House to back-pedal from the original plan to encourage kids to write essays on how they could help the president achieve his goals for America. Even better would be cancelling this speech entirely.
