I suppose Rick Hess is right about the good intentions behind the president’s national address to schoolchildren, but I’m getting less and less worried about intentions and more and more worried about the creepiness factor in this presidency. What I liked about Barack Obama during the campaign, and what made me believe he had a chance of being a seriously good president, was his persona—smart, good humored, reasonable, disciplined. Where did that guy go? I do not throw “narcissistic” around casually, but I’m hard put to find another word to describe his disconcerting sense of what presidents are supposed to do, with his plan to deliver a national address to elementary and secondary students on September 8 being the latest case in point.
Presidents have gone to visit schools from time out of mind. That’s fine. But a national speech? Has any other president ever done anything like this? I can’t think of one, and can’t imagine that any other president would have thought it was an appropriate thing to do. I suspect they would have thought it a little presumptuous. A national speech to schoolchildren is something that a Dear Leader would do. Something that somebody who thinks he is God’s gift to children would do. Does it really not even occur to Mr. Obama that millions of parents are going to be unhappy about this?
And Mr. Obama has so many enablers who are ready to help build the cult of personality, as in the “Menu of Classroom Activities” that the Department of Education asks elementary school teachers to use on the day of the president’s speech. An excerpt:
Students could discuss their responses to the following questions:
What do you think the president wants us to do?
Does the speech make you want to do anything?
Are we able to do what President Obama is asking of us?
Read the whole thing to get the gestalt of it. The “Dear Leader” analogy is not all that far-fetched.
To those Obama supporters who put this kind of reaction down to angry conservatives, ask yourselves: quite apart from your political views, if George W. Bush had proposed to make a national speech to schoolchildren, complete with lesson plans, isn’t “creepy” a word that would have come to mind?