[StBernard] Obama's speech to school children

[Westley Annis]

YouTube: Children Sing for Obama <http://blip.tv/file/1309087> 

Pulling this from an article I read on a blog:

Remember during the Democratic primaries, how many said their children
wanted them to vote for him. In keeping with his community organizing
training, Obama's pattern has been to bamboozle the most vulnerable
citizens. He went after the youth. And some of their parents fell in line.
Do you remember this video from last year?



By all accounts, this school speech should not have been a problem. Ronald
Reagan did it, the elder Bush did it. But why the resistance to Obama? And
contrary to the media lapdogs saying it is all conservatives, I think there
is resistance from a lot of different quarters. The media and Obama's
handlers made up this humongous marketing campaign and they are still in it.
The supporters in their drunkenness are still perpetuating the cult of
personality theme enough to scare a parent.

There was a pied piper like quality to Obama's election campaign. There was
no vetting, no hard questions, accept everything, and ignore the lies and
the obfuscation. What do we really know about this man, the president of the
free world? Why are his transcripts sealed? Why is there a one-page medical
report? I won't even say the B word but there are so many things that we
don't know and the media didn't ask. I think the media shenanigans of last
year are finally catching up. It is ironical that they thought they were
helping him but does not appear to be so.

The tea parties, the town hall eruptions about his health insurance reform,
and now the resistance to his what would have otherwise been an innocuous
speech are all indications of a bigger problem Obama is encountering. A
problem mostly caused by how his minions and supporters have behaved over
the course of his election. A problem caused by his lack of candor and lack
of transparency in telling us who he is and what he stands for.

I can understand the mistrust of the people resisting his speech but what I
don't understand is the stupidity of Obama and his handlers. They have not
explained to the people the rationale for why that speech to the children
and why now. "Oh, he wants to inspire them" is not enough. Parents are not
just going to give up control of their children to someone they don't trust,
even for a couple of hours. Obama should get back to governing and leave the
inspiration hullabaloo to parent-approved life coaches. Maybe if he
demonstrates success for what we hired him to do, namely policy and
governance, parents and others will perhaps look up to him on other matters.

Here's a comment from someone who read the speech after it was released by
the White House:

I think the White House and Obama fouled this up from the beginning, making
it look much more political than necessary, and gave their critics a
boatload of ammunition with which to attack them. The speech, included in
its entirety below, turned out to be entirely innocuous. But by asking
teachers to impress upon children the need to "help President Obama," they
made it look blatantly political. They seem to have forgotten that they're
the public servants, and that the people do not live to serve political
masters. As Frank Wilson puts it in another context, Americans see
themselves as citizens, not subjects, with the President only of a higher
rank for the temporary period of time that we put him there. This has been
incompetently handled from beginning to end, including the highly
embarrassing scheduling that inadvertently excluded millions of students
from the speech.
[snip] 

Update II: I've run the speech through a word frequency counter and found
the following results:

* 56 iterations of "I"
* 19 iterations of "school"
* 10 iterations of "education"
* 8 iterations of "responsibility"
* 7 iterations of "country"
* 5 iterations each of "parents", "teachers"
* 3 iterations of "nation"

In other words, Barack Obama referenced himself more than school, education,
responsibility, country/nation, parents, and teachers combined. And to think
that people accused Obama of self-promotion!