The Obama administration has an extremely banal plan to have the President deliver a September 8 address to K-6 schoolchildren about the importance of personal responsibility and education. Naturally, the right-wing is staging a massive freakout. Check this out from Eric Kleefeld:
I just spoke with Florida Republican Party press secretary Katie Gordon, regarding state party chairman Jim Greer’s denunciation of President Obama’s upcoming national address to schoolchildren on Tuesday. Gordon stood by the party’s press release — and said that children should not be subjected to what she said is a clear attempt at political indoctrination by the Obama administration.
It’s true—Obama is looking to indoctrinate kids in the value of perseverance and hard work.
Probably the biggest moral of the story is that the contemporary conservative movement is run by crazy people with no scruples, who’ll turn anything into a pretext to level wild accusations. But a larger issue is that this is one of those circumstances in which the United States suffers from having fused the roles of head of state and head of government. What Obama wants to do is speak to kids in his role as head of state—symbol of national authority. But what Obama’s critics see is schools asking kids to sit and listen to the head of government—a partisan politician whose job is to frame and seek to implement controversial policy initiatives. If the King of America wanted to talk to kids, nobody would mind.
Previous in TP Yglesias
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.