DAYTON, Ohio — Ronald Reagan could have said it, but Barack Obama did, to America"s schoolchildren on the day after Labor Day:
"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 not trying. ...
"Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. ...
"I know that sometimes you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are you're not going to be any of those things. ...
"The story of America isn't about people who quit when things got tough. It's about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best."
How is it possible that the very conservative people who didn't want their children to see President Obama's speech to schoolchildren didn't know that it would be a conservative speech?
How could they not have known that it would celebrate the accessibility of the American dream when pursued diligently? He has always talked this way.
How is it possible they imagined that he would use the occasion to promote his "socialist" agenda?
The calls to schools from anxious parents did not arise from newspaper or television stories saying the president would deliver a back-to-school speech. They arose because alarms went up on talk radio, talk television and conservative Internet sites. Alarms about political content, about indoctrination.
Said one Fox television commentator, "This is what Chairman Mao did."
Some people say the Obama offense was not just the desire to give the speech, but a suggestion that went out from the Department of Education. DOE proposed that schools have students write about how to "help the president."
But that suggestion could easily be ignored. Educators write lesson plans. This one had an unfortunate phrase. Big deal.
Yet the superintendent of schools in Springboro, in suburban Dayton, said Friday that so many complaints were coming in about the speech that "I"m getting absolutely nothing else done."
All around the suburbs, superintendents and principals were meeting about what to do. In some places around Ohio, that process continued into this week, when last week's decisions were modified.
Meanwhile, there was no great fuss in Dayton. So maybe the speech ended up reaching the kids the president had most in mind: those from poor and troubled neighborhoods and families, those facing the hardest struggles, from places where dropout rates are highest.
Still, there's a problem to be paused over here: political inanity of a special degree.
Some commentators have said that the automatic hostility in some circles to all things Obama is like the same attitude in other quarters to all things Bush in the years before 2009.
Well, yes, there was a certain mania about that, a certain obsessiveness. But when did it result in something as bizarre as this: people calling school offices all over the country to object to the unobjectionable, to politicize the most nonpolitical work of a president?
Liberals complained when the first President Bush gave a similar speech. But there was nothing like this.
Hardly anybody complained that President George W. Bush turned out to be in a public school on 9/11 (he went to many schools to promote his education agenda) or that Dan Quayle was campaigning in a public school when he misspelled potato.
The special force at work today is the right-wing propaganda machine in the media. More skilled than ever, after decades of honing, it relentlessly delivers the message that the Democrats are not simply mistaken, but corrupt, evil, manipulative, extreme, anti-American, hateful and particularly contemptuous of you (the listener) and your values.
That's the context in which listeners develop preposterous fears about the most innocuous event. They are primed to believe just about anything.
One has to wonder what it will take to make them start to wonder about the sources of their information. How many absurd alarms about death squads and birth certificates — and speeches?
Martin Gottlieb writes for the Dayton Daily News. E-mail: mgottlieb(at)DaytonDailyNews.com.