Academic

THIS, FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, IS INTERESTING: The White House officials are eager to avoid the ?

By Glenn Reynolds

THIS, FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, IS INTERESTING:

The White House officials are eager to avoid the perception that the president is directly engaging critics who appear to speak only for a vocal minority, and part of their strategy involves pushing material to liberal and progressive media outlets to steer the coverage in their direction, senior advisers said.

When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.

The Anchoress writes, “That?s one thing that struck me about Obama?s speech to the school children: how nothing he said seemed to bear any direct relation to the problematic teaching materials which had been released in anticipation of the event. I suspected, then, that the speech had been re-written into utter banality in order to make the conservatives who objected to the speech seem like paranoid nutters. This seems to confirm that. And it?s a brilliant tactic; were I in the WH, I?d have done the same thing.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on September 16, 2009 (boomark / email).