Obama's Controversial Uncontroversial Speech

Because of what happened on that day, almost all of us know that on the morning of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush visited an elementary school, talking and reading to the kids—and, I’m sure, encouraging them to study hard and stay in school, to take advantage of the educational system that our nation provides, and to develop the skills and knowledge they need in order to succeed and to contribute to the this great nation’s future.

I’m certain it was a thrilling experience for the children, at least until the tragic events of the day cast a shadow over the proceedings: The president of the United States of America, the most powerful political leader in the world, was coming to their school to talk to them!

Even children whose parents had voted for Al Gore (and perhaps believed the election had been stolen) were likely excited about the presidential visit. After all, even if one doesn’t agree with the policies and visions of a particular president, the office itself merits respect, as does the constitutional system which guarantees that the office-holder is elected through democratic means. At least that’s what my politically conservative friends would tell me when I’d criticize the Bush administration and its policies.

Had I been a parent at that school, there’s a snitty and less-than-admirable part of me that might have been tempted to keep my child home in order to protest the improperly elected usurper’s attempts to authenticate his sham presidency through the star-struck wonder of school children. Instead, I like to think I'd have swallowed back these partisan and unfair exaggerations in favor of letting my child enjoy the thrill of such an extraordinary visit: the President of the United States taking time out of his overwhelming schedule to meet with our kids. In fact, this seems like one of the most benign and admirable uses of the office of the presidency—to use it as a platform to reach out to our young people and encourage them to make full use of the educational opportunities our nation provides.

Now, eight years after the second Bush's fateful classroom visit, President Barack Obama is borrowing a page from the first President Bush by offering a live, televised speech to school children at the start of the school year—a speech whose message encourages kids to study hard and stay in school, to take advantage of the educational system that our nation provides, and to develop the skills and knowledge they need in order to succeed and to contribute to this great nation’s future. I've read the text of the speech, so I can confirm that this is pretty much what it's about.

Where I live in Oklahoma—which has the distinction of having been the “reddest” state in the union during the last presidential election—the announcement that Obama would offer such a speech became an occasion for widespread outrage. The event has been likened to Nazi propagandizing, and has been called an effort to indoctrinate school kids into Obama’s “socialist” agenda. Parents—and not just a few of them—threatened to keep kids home from school in order to protect them from this intolerable affront to human decency. And insofar as the attendance rate is one of the measures by which schools are evaluated and ranked, this is a threat that school administrators take seriously.

In the town where I live, the school district responded with the following policy: there would be no general airing of the speech, but individual teachers might choose to show it if they judged it a good fit with their lesson plan. But teachers who did so would need to inform parents in advance and offer an alternative activity for those students whose parents did not give them permission to watch. I'm sure there are plenty of parents who will do just that.

All of this is true even though the Obama administration has been assuring everyone from the start that the president’s speech wouldn’t be a partisan one. One wonders, in the face of this assurance, how the language of “propaganda” and “indoctrination” can take a foothold. Do Obama’s detractors really think he would lie about something like this? And if so, do they imagine that Obama could get away with such a lie, when the speech in question is being nationally televised and subject to the inevitable scrutiny of the news-hungry media, including Fox News, as well as every conservative blogger in the country?

Let’s be honest here: Barack Obama is far too politically savvy to put himself into that kind of political trap. And so, even before the text of his speech was made public earlier today, we could all be pretty confident that the speech would be exactly what he said it would be. After having read the text of it, I can testify that, while it's inevitably laced with personal anecdotes from Obama's life and inspiring stories of students who made the most of their education despite challenges (the kinds of "personalizing" narratives that Reagan popularized), the speech is essentially an effort to inspire young people to make full use of the opportunities that a public education provides.

None of this is the least bit surprising. I doubt that anyone who really reflected on the matter seriously believed that Obama would commit political suicide by using the school speech as a platform to advocate controversial policy initiatives.

Which can only lead me to believe that this furor about “propaganda” and “indoctrination” has been about something other than the content of the speech all along. What it comes down to, I think, is that airing Obama’s speech in schools carries with it a subtext: Here is a man you should listen to, someone whose opinion counts, someone, perhaps, whom you should even respect. And many opponents of Obama--despite the notion that the office of the presidency confers a certain measure of respect regardless of who occupies it--are appalled by the prospect of this message.

In many cases, the reason why conservatives don’t want their kids to look on our current president with an attitude of respect is purely political. They want Obama’s policy agenda to fail, and they think that if our kids look up to Obama, that attitude might “trickle up,” improving Obama’s political capital.

At least in a few cases, the source of this opposition is rooted in racism, most likely the covert kind that operates on the subconscious rather than the conscious level. Obama is a black man who is refined and eloquent and brilliant, and as such defies some of the more deeply embedded racial stereotypes. We tend to be fans of our stereotypes and prejudices, so much so that we long, unconsciously at least, to pass them on to our children. Obama’s speech threatens that.

In other cases, the source of the opposition is likely rooted in the kind of populism that disdains academics and intellectuals. The grim truth is that Obama is an intellectual to the core, a policy wonk who once helmed the Harvard Law Review and who can intelligently discuss Reinhold Niebuhr’s views on moral paradox with the best among academic theologians. And at some point in the course of American history, there has emerged a confusion between two things: on the one hand, the rare and distinctive intellectual achievement which renders some people more deserving than others of our attention simply because they know what they’re talking about; on the other hand, the patterns of social and economic privilege that systematically diminish genuine equal opportunity for every citizen.

Paradoxically, George W. Bush was a beneficiary of political and economic privilege, a man whose political career would likely never have happened if not for the familial connections and resources he could draw on—but he did not run afoul of the dominant American populism because he talked and acted like a regular guy. By contrast, Obama, who was clearly not a beneficiary of privilege, who worked his way up through the use of his native gifts and took advantage of the opportunities presented him to eventually become the first African American president, does run afoul of this populism. Obama comes off as if he’s smarter than most other people, not because he tries to show off, but because he is smarter than most other people.

Ironically, someone like Obama is precisely the kind of person with the authority to tell school kids that if they stay in school, work hard, become engaged in civic life and take advantage of the opportunities that they are given, they can grow up to be whatever their talents allow…perhaps even President of the United States. Such a message has far more authority coming from Obama than it does from someone who grew up in a wealthy and politically connected family. After reading the text of his speech, I can confirm that Obama takes advantage of this fact, highlighting his own personal struggles in order to accentuate the message that even the child of a financially struggling single mother can make it in this country.

Perhaps the kind of elitism that is represented by Obama is seen as a threat precisely because it is rooted in who Obama is rather than in who his friends and family are. Perhaps parents are subconsciously afraid that their children will see Obama and not only get the message that this is someone they are supposed to look up to, but end up actually doing so. Obama might just come off looking good in front of children across the country, even among those children whose parents have been so polarized against Obama that they want their children to think of Obama as the antichrist. Perhaps parents fear that the next time they claim that Obama threatens the very fabric of civilization, their kids will look at them with a healthy dose of skepticism.

If so, I'm afraid that, at least in most cases, these parents may be underestimating their own powers of indoctrination.