Word: speech
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...take the Sunshine State since FDR - many saw it as a sign of centrist GOP governor Charlie Crist's moderating influence. But lately, Florida's disgruntled Republicans aren't looking very moderate. This week, in fact, the peninsula's GOP registered arguably the loudest outcry over the education speech President Obama plans to deliver to U.S. primary and secondary students via webcast and C-Span next Tuesday, Sept. 8. In perhaps the most over-the-top performance, state Republican chairman Jim Greer called it an attempt to use "our children to spread liberal propaganda" and "President Obama's socialist ideology...
...public-school systems in both Collier and next-door Lee counties, a conservative pocket in southwest Florida that includes Naples, announced on Thursday, Sept. 3, that their students won't be seeing Obama's speech. In a statement, Collier County schools superintendent Dennis Thompson cited "the logistics of making a webcast available during that time of the school day." But his office also acknowledged that he'd been hearing from the community and its fears about Big Brother Barack. "We tend to be very conservative here," says Dean. "This President is extremely liberal, and we worry that he's leading...
School districts in at least half a dozen other states have made similar decisions not to air the President's talk. In one of those states, Minnesota, Republican governor and possible 2012 presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty called the speech "uninvited" and voiced concerns about its "content and motive." One school superintendent in Arizona, James Murlless, while calling Obama's education advocacy "well intended," said he preferred his students see it "in their own homes, under the supervision of their parents." The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group that has become a sort of clearinghouse for conservative grievances since...
Asked if the Collier school district would have made the same ruling about webcast "logistics" if Obama's Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, had proposed making a similar speech to U.S. students, a spokesman for Thompson told TIME, "exactly." But Dean calls it "a moot question" because "I don't think President Bush would have ever done it. He understood that this sort of thing starts in the home." But when reminded that Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, broadcast a similar speech to the nation's pupils, Dean says, "That was different. It was, if I remember, largely...
That point was often raised Thursday night further north on Florida's Gulf Coast, in Tampa. There, as a result, the Hillsborough County School Board ruled at a meeting that it would allow the speech. Dean and other speech opponents insist the Administration has not given educators an advance look at it, but Hillsborough schools superintendent Mary Ellen Elia announced that she and board members had indeed seen it and concluded that it conveys a healthy, nonpartisan message. Said Democratic board member Doretha Edgecomb: "It's a message that a lot of Presidents have given before." But some members complained...