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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > September > 09
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Martin Gottlieb: False alarms about Obama speech should raise an alarm about alarmists
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 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?
Permalink | Comments (27) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, National Politics, Suburban Communities
Editorial: Sale of Diebold is good news
The company that makes voting machines used in Montgomery, Greene, Miami, Darke and Butler counties has sold that operation to the company that makes the machines used in all the other counties in the Miami Valley: Warren, Preble, Clark, Champaign, Shelby and Clinton.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound like a great thing. The big get bigger. Less competition.
In this case, however, there’s good news.
The hyper-controversial Diebold Inc. makes the touch-screen, ATM-like machines used in the first group of counties. In recent years, it changed the name of its election-machine subsidiary to Premier Election Solutions Inc. and has taken a hands-off approach. But the machines are still associated with Diebold.
Elections machines are a small part of Diebold’s business. The company also makes ATMs and security systems. (Diebold is headquartered in Canton, but the election-machine subsidiary is based in Texas.)
Diebold got into the elections business in 2002. That was after the disputed 2000 presidential election led to a move away from punch-card ballots, which were used in Montgomery County and much of Ohio.
The move away from punch cards — and their sometimes hanging chads — was initially supported by many on the political left. The punch cards were seen as resulting in Democrats’ votes going uncounted.
But then the top guy at Diebold turned out to be a big supporter of then-President George W. Bush. Walden W. O’Dell wrote in a fundraising letter, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
In a time when people were worrying whether these mysterious new machines could be manipulated by tech-savvy bad guys, that declaration resonated — and resonated.
That was just the beginning. There were problems with the machines, resulting in lawsuits. One in Ohio asks the company to pay for machine problems in 11 counties, including vote-rich and Democratic Cuyahoga County.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has urged counties like Montgomery to move away from the Diebold equipment.
The reason the company has sold out is not that the Bush connection proved fatally embarrassing. It is that the division has been losing money. (The offending executive was eventually removed, but that, too, was after profits dropped.)
After spending more than $30 million to get into the election-machines business (according to the Wall Street Journal), Diebold is selling out for $5 million.
The buyer is Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., already the largest maker of election machines.
The local counties that use ES&S have optical-scanner systems. However, Franklin and eight other Ohio counties use its touch-screen system.
Forty-four Ohio counties use the Diebold touch-screen system.
The concentration of power in the hands of ES&S is not a great thing, in and of itself. The controversies and questions about ensuring the integrity of elections can become all the more heated if just a few players are calling all the shots and producing all the principal experts.
But buyers are gaining experience with the new generation of machines. Increasingly, they know what they are looking for. Certainly ES&S will be highly motivated to service and improve the machines that many Ohio counties use.
The administration of elections is a highly touchy subject — touch screen or no touch screen.
In Ohio and elsewhere, good safeguards are in place to ensure against partisan manipulation. But try to convince the political warriors of that.
The fewer the legitimate reasons for skepticism, the better. The Diebold name was snake-bitten, the product didn’t satisfy, and changing the name didn’t help much.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Elections, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio government
