By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Even though negative reaction to President Obama’s speech to school students today is being largely dismissed by liberal media and politicians, a similar speech by President George H. W. Bush in 1991 prompted an extensive investigation on the Hill and media reports accusing him of producing “paid political advertising.”
In an op-ed appearing in the Washington Examiner, chief political correspondent Byron York says that when President Bush delivered a similar speech on Oct. 1, 1991 at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, the speech was not only denounced by the Democratic majority, they also ordered an investigation and summoned top Bush administration officials to the Hill for extensive hearings on the affair.
On the day after the speech, the Washington Post, “published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit,” York writes. In the article, the Post accused the White House of turning a junior high classroom “into a television studio and its students into props.”
Richard Gephardt, who was serving as the House Majority Leader at the time, lambasted the administration, saying “The Department of Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the president. It should be helping us to produce smarter students. And the president should be doing more about education than saying, ‘Lights, camera, action.'”
In the end, the General Accounting Office (GAO) concluded that the Bush administration had not acted improperly when it spent more than $26,000 on the school speech.
“The speech itself and the use of the department’s funds to support it, including the cost of the production contract, appear to be legal,” the GAO wrote. “The speech also does not appear to have violated the restrictions on the use of appropriations for publicity and propaganda.”
But, as York points out, “that didn’t stop Democratic allies from taking their own shots at Bush. The National Education Association denounced the speech, saying it ‘cannot endorse a president who spends $26,000 of taxpayers’ money on a staged media event at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. — while cutting school lunch funds for our neediest youngsters.”
Even though the Obama speech was accompanied by a questionable – and later discarded – lesson plan asking students to write about ways they could help the president, the only negative publicity has been directed against those who are opposed to today’s speech.
And thus far, there have been no calls for an investigation – nor does anyone expect there will be anytime soon.
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