In an ideal world, the folks who spent the last two weeks screeching about how President Obama would "indoctrinate" America's children by urging them to work hard and stay in school would suffer a loss in influence and stature once those charges turned out to be completely and utterly unfounded. While these kinds of speeches have always been subject to partisan criticisms, the qualitative difference between accusing the President of "indoctrination" and of campaigning on the job is massive.
The "indoctrination" accusation also has to be viewed in the context of the larger far right narrative--which is that the elected leader of this country is in fact, some kind of traitor, an outsider who is subverting the nation to his own villainous ends. This is the core feeling animating everything from birtherism to the cries of "socialism" from Republicans who demand government keep its hands off their medicare. Even when it isn't tied to the obvious hysteria of birtherism, the subtext of conservative criticisms of the President's legitimacy are fairly similar, which is that, for one reason or another, Obama isn't a legitimate President.
In the meantime, the President delivered what was mostly an unremarkable speech about the importance of staying in school, with one fairly compelling moment:
Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don't have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there's not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don't feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren't right.
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home – that's no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up. No one's written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.
There are children in this country for whom this message, coming from any other president, would be meaningless. But because it comes from the first African-American president, a man who grew up without a father in the home, it takes on an altogether different meaning. It's not just something elites say to make themselves feel better about the advantages they were born with. It's coming from someone who's lived with some of those disadvantages. I think on some level it's sort of silly to point to exceptional people as proof that everything comes down to individual will and nothing to do with public policy or individual circumstances--but as long as that message isn't used as an excuse to promote bad policies I don't see a problem.
The message Obama gave today is one conservatives would support, if they didn't believe that everything Obama says and does is illegitimate by definition. The opposition party, by definition, mostly opposes what the majority party does. But at this point, the most mundane gestures from the President are met with a kind of unfettered hysteria. For some reason, every outburst and tantrum is treated with the utmost seriousness in the mainstream press. What that means is that even when the freakouts turn out to be as much of a non-story as this one, the press has to continue pretending they're a huge deal in order to justify the attention they gave it in the first place.
-- A. Serwer
