Another Misstep by Obama, misunderstood by his supporters

As I write, I am in a hotel room in Nashville on vacation. Being away from a home base for a couple of days in a row, I feel the days news builds, and snowballs, and gets away from me. The Iphone for all of its virtues, cannot keep me in the loop in the same way as a laptop, at best I can read a mere fraction of my normal daily reading. As I've been on this trip, once such snowball has formed into a massive avalanche of a controversy, and as usual, things have become beyond twisted.

On Tuesday before we left for Memphis, I read an article about the President's attempt to "rebound" after his brutal August. Part of that plan included a seemingly innocuous plan to speak to schoolchildren. My initial thought from the article was, "thats a safe and positive route to go". I was wrong on both points. The next article I read had the link to the text of the educational aides that would be distributed to the teachers. Part of the literature included an exercise in which America's school children would be asked things like "what does the president do?", "what does the president want me to do?" and "what can i do to help the president?"...hmm... ok, so instead of askin how to "help my country", or "help my school", or "help my community" or "help my family", or "help myself". ...they are asked how to "help my President"??? This seemed very very unsettling to me. I know I'm not his biggest fan, but I actually thought this was something that any intellectually honest person would understand as alarming. I was wrong again. From gazing facebook and liberal blogs, I'm disappointed to once again be reduced to a "racist" and an "idiot" for having a problem with the President addressing the nation's school children. As if that is the only reason people are upset, just the fact that he is speaking to the kids. Nevermind that I, and no doubt countless others, were totally fine with the concept of a presidential address to schoolchildren about non-partisan uniting themes such as "staying in school", and "doing your best". But like me, they probably felt that enlisting their children in a partisan way to "help the president" crossed the line of propriety.

If you really cannot see anything wrong with this, then imagine for a moment the President was someone who you not only do not support, but whose policies you think are very bad for the country. Now imagine that this President was asking your children/all children to think of ways to "help him" with those very policies you think are bad/wrong for the country. Do you really think that would have been ok with you?

Therein lies the problem. Had Obama and/or his administration left his ego and his political agenda out of it from the beginning, this would have been a Win/Win for Obama, and a much needed moment of unity in our country. Please be clear about the real reason for the outrage...its not simply that he wants to talk to school children...its not because he's black. It is because politics was injected into the equation, and now, along with feeling for years that the education system was a vehicle to indoctrinate children with liberal policies, parents now do not trust that their children will not be indoctrinated to policies they disagree with.

I have heard the President has retracted the exercise that was most alarming, good move..but a better move would have been to not include it in the first place.

one more thing...It did not help Obama's cause at all that during the same week as this controversy, some schools decided to show kids this video that talks about pledging to do things like "stem cell research" and to "not give people the finger while driving" and to "pledge to be a servant to President Barack Obama"