President sets out to motivate children despite partisan row

THE LATEST furore surrounding the Obama presidency appeared to have subsided yesterday after the US leader delivered televised remarks to some 50 million schoolchildren across the nation.

The speech passed off smoothly, with only a handful of protesters standing outside Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, when President Barack Obama arrived late in the morning. They carried placards saying, “Mr President, Stay Away From Our Kids” and “Children Serve God, Not Obama.”

Republicans last week seized upon the scheduled address to attack Mr Obama. Jim Greer, the chairman of the Republican Party in Florida, accused the president of trying “to indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.” Conservatives particularly objected to guidance suggesting that students be asked to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president”. On September 2nd the phrase was changed to read: “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term goals.”

Mainstream Republicans shied away from the debate, and Mr Obama received support from unexpected quarters. The former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, told Fox News: “It is good to have the president of the United States saying to young people across America stay in school and do your homework. It’s good for America.”

The former first lady Laura Bush told CNN: “There’s a place for the president of the United States to talk to schoolchildren and encourage schoolchildren . . . I also think it’s really important for everyone to respect the president of the United States.”

Mr Obama’s supporters claim the president has inspired students from poor and minority backgrounds to work harder. In the library before his televised address, Mr Obama told ninth graders he was “kind of a goof-off” at their age, and was more interested in basketball and having fun than in studying.

The speech drew on Mr Obama’s personal experience, recounting how his mother woke him at 4.30am in Indonesia to study the US curriculum, how his father abandoned them when he was two, and his mother struggled to pay bills.

He stressed responsibility and the link between individual behaviour and the future of the US. He even told students to wash their hands to stem the spread of swine flu. “No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future,” he said.