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Why schools in Nixa, Mo., won’t show Obama’s speech

Dante Chinni

Posted: 09.07.2009 / 3:56 PM PDT

On Tuesday at noon President Obama will speak directly to students in Arlington, Va., and, by broadcast, to students across the country who tune in to watch.

According to the online transcript of the speech, posted Monday, it will be a garden-variety pep talk encouraging students to stay in school and set goals for themselves. But during the past week it has blown up to become a political hot topic in some school districts around the country.

Some conservatives view the speech as unnecessary, or worse, see it as the president trying to push his political agenda on kids. Some parents are demanding that their children be excused from watching the speech.

All of this is happening as the president’s cabinet and supporters – and even his opponents – say they don’t understand the dustup.

What’s going on exactly? To understand the angst, it may help to zero in on a community that is strongly opposed to the president.

Trouble in an Evangelical Epicenter

A look at the reaction in Nixa, Mo., a socially conservative “Evangelical Epicenter,” shows the extent to which a largely non-political speech can become a political lightning rod. Patchwork Nation blogger John Schmalzbauer called our attention to the controversy in the area.

On Thursday, the day after the speech was announced, Vincent David Jericho, a conservative radio host in the area, made it a central theme of his show. One caller compared the Obama talk to the work of China’s Communist Party under Mao, without Mr. Jericho raising an objection.

(Click here to download the program. Note: Download time can be lengthy.)

Jericho explained that one of his concerns was that Obama would be portrayed as someone of great character who might say something that contradicts the words of a parent. “Now you have a very conflicted child who’s trying to find out who’s right,” Jericho said.

One local conservative blog looked at the lesson plan ideas the Department of Education sent out to schools – “Create posters of their goals,” “Graph individual progress toward goals” – and concluded that it “stinks of indoctrination.”

For its part, the Nixa Public Schools, considered to be one of the state’s better districts, decided to steer clear of local controversy and “not participate” in the speech.

“Selected high school classes may end up presenting the ‘President’s speech-to-school children’ in a course such as government, political science, etc. We will make available the webcast link to all families who wish to access it on their own during non-school time,” school superintendent Stephen Kleinsmith wrote on the district’s Web site.

Never Obama country

Nixa is only one place, of course. But judging by the headlines this past week, it is not alone. There are hundreds of other communities – many of them Evangelical Epicenters – concerned about the president’s speech.

Nixa has never been Obama country. The president captured only 31.5 percent of the vote in surrounding Christian County. That’s only slightly worse that in the counties we call Evangelical Epicenters as a whole, where Obama got 33 percent.

These places are highly suspicious of the Obama administration and have been from the beginning. Back in January, Pastor Gary Swearegin, of the Nixa Church of the Nazarene, said he was pleased the Obama administration had not outlawed Sunday services.

That’s not to say everyone in the Epicenters is anti-Obama, but those communities hold high concentrations of people who oppose the president. Their social and political cultures are more intensely conservative and more intensely anti-Obama than those of other Patchwork Nation community types.

Town hall effect?

Even taking into account that conservative bent, however, the feedback on the speech is strong. It may be that one of the drivers is the August healthcare town halls and their coverage.

During the past few weeks our contacts around our Patchwork Nation communities have sounded more engaged, but also more divided. Not just in Nixa, but in other communities that sided against Obama last November.

In Hopkinsville, Ky., our “Military Bastion” near Fort Campbell, one correspondent writes that he may be seeing the beginning of turn against military policy in Afghanistan. (More on that in coming days and weeks.)

In Sioux Center, Iowa, an agricultural “Tractor Country” community, blogger Don King says the town hall meetings have at least contributed to the perception of a growing anti-Obama mood.

“All the propaganda and negative information disseminated about healthcare reform turns out the crowds of primarily seniors at the meetings with legislators like Grassley and they interpret that as a rising tide of opposition,” King writes in an e-mail.

He also notes, though, that those meetings catered to certain groups of people and seniors, who turned out and spoke loudly.

Whoever turned out for the meetings and why they did, the lasting impact may spread much further than  healthcare reform.