School Daze

I think the point is missed in this whole dust-up over President Obama's Back-to-School speech this noon.

Few people would question President Obama's right to deliver an address on education to the people closest to the subject: students. Few people would question any president's right to address specific segments of the population. The president recently addressed veterans via the VFW convention. He addressed Organized Labor via an AFL-CIO convention. Presidents have a right and, frankly, an obligation, to address their citizens, whether they are middle-aged industrialists or teenagers in school.

Presidents including both H.W. Bush and his son, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have all met with and addressed students. Few remember that George Bush was in Florida, reading to elementary school children as part of a literacy push, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

But this is yet another controversy of this president's own making. First, it is stunning how the team of advisers who delivered the White House to him with tight messaging, adept use of social media, and great public relations could suddenly turn out to be so tone deaf to the American people. It's not the stay-in-school theme that has people upset. It was the "Big-Brother-knows-everything-so-let-him-explain-it-to-you" lesson plan that was supposed to accompany it that angered the American people.

This American president, for someone who is supposed to be so bright, knows very little about Americans. If he did he would know that in matters of learning, parents consider themselves, not professional educators, and certainly not federal bureaucrats, to be their children's first and best teachers. Maybe in President Obama's Euro-world view education is the province of central planners. But in this country education takes place in the home and in the neighborhood schoolhouse.

Second, and maybe more troubling, is this president's tendency to always want to do the "great" thing. It's not enough to inject federalism into an ailing economy in the form of tax breaks. No, we have to have the high drama of midnight congressional sessions to pass a $787 billion "stimulus" plan. Tax breaks would have been more immediate (We've only seen 7% of the stimulus money; tax breaks would have been in people's pockets in two weeks.), but not as "great."

It's passing on the chance at bi-partisan, true healthcare reform for the chance to remake the healthcare system for all time.

Iin this case, if President Obama really wanted to shine the spotlight on education, spending a day at a DC-area high school would have gotten the job done. Hold an assembly. Maybe find an American history class, and help teach it that day. Eat lunch in the cafeteria with students. He would have gotten just as much press, but it would have been more positive.

But that wasn't big enough, or great enough. Instead, we have this need to wire up every school in America to show how technologically hip we are. Again, tonal deafness. Where the President and his Beltway Band saw the chance to deliver an education message grander and greater than any president before him, the American people saw it as a metaphor for a presidency that wants to control every aspect of American life from the Oval Office.

It's this need to be great without having earned the reputation that is so troubling to most Americans. Great things are accomplished by a lot of hard work on the little details, something this president does not seem be particularly adept at.

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them, wrote Shakespeare.

"Some men are born great, some men achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers," quipped historian Daniel Boorstin. He must have been thinking of Barack Obama.

Just thought you might like to know.