President Obama’s upcoming school speech has created another political backlash against the White House. Parents are considering keeping their kids at home next Tuesday when Obama addresses children across America, while school districts in six states will refrain from showing the address. One of the main reasons for this most recent backlash is that a large and growing segment of the American public simply does not trust the Obama administration and the Moveon “progressive” movement with which he is affiliated.
On the campaign trail, Obama promised to be a post-partisan, post-racial leader who would work to transcend the corrupt divisiveness of Washington, DC. In the Oval Office, however, Obama has actually governed as a stealth partisan Alinskyite while promoting policies that shift back-and-forth between crony corporatism and 21st century-style progressivism. As a result, millions of former McCain voters have now become hardened in their opposition to Obama, while millions of former centrist/moderate Obama voters are losing faith in him as well.
When parents who do not support Obama heard that he was going to broadcast more of his words just words directly into their children’s classrooms, many of them did not trust that Obama would use the venue for the strict purpose of promoting strong educational values – especially after they found out that the original lesson plans asked students to think of ways that they could personally help the President accomplish his goals.
As usual, Obama-supporters can try to blame Obama’s trust deficit on the “Right Wing noise machine” and/or claim that only a small minority of rabble rousers genuinely distrust the President. They similarly dismissed the concerns of tea-party participants and health care town hall protestors. This morning, Heather Higginbottom, deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, admitted that Obama’s lesson plan was “inartfully worded,” but then she went right back to attacking the messengers by saying, “We need to be rising above this . . . when the president goes out to talk to students about education, this shouldn’t be a tool for the right wing.”
Higgingbottom’s “apology” follows the same standard operting procedure used by the Obama administration whenever it makes a mistake or commits an overreach: in a faux-hurt tone of voice, an administration spokesperson, or the President himself, explains that it was all just an inadvertant, “clumsy” mistake, and then accuses the right-wing of cynically exploiting a few typos or minor issues in an effort to derail the Hope n’ Change Express. Helped along by a compliant mainstream press, this kind of response is probably a good short-term game plan for achieving Alinskyite objectives, but how effective is it at building long-term public trust? Also, I remember countless Democrats and progressives accusing George W. Bush of being incapable of self-criticism. Who needs to look in the mirror now?
Speaking of that mirror, I ask all three or four of my liberal/progressive readers: What has Obama done to restore trust in the federal government and to demonstrate that he represents all American families? We heard a lot of windowdressing – when Obama wasn’t reminding his political opponents that “I won” – but I can’t recall him engaging in any genuine bridge-building efforts. Maybe you can enlighten me. But, again, I suspect that your movement will be better served by introspection now rather than more thrust and parry.
Update
A Los Angeles Times op-ed suggests that parents who choose to keep their children at home the day of Obama’s school speech must be wild-eyed, bizarre, paranoid, unhinged birthers. Where have we heard that before?
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