Karl Rove appeared on Fox News today, and joined in on the emerging right-wing line that the White House changed the text of the back-to-school speech — which they say would have originally been aimed at political indoctrination of schoolchildren — after conservatives objected. And Rove also charged that the whole speech is an improper use of government resources to advance President Obama’s political profile.
“Oh, I bet it was,” Rove said, when he was asked whether it was rewritten. “I mean, look, the White House was tone deaf, they clearly had a purpose here, which was, let’s have the President speak to every student in the country, let’s have a study guide, let’s have them write the President and the President can write them back.
“In fact, they still have that in there,” Rove continued. “The students are now being encouraged to write the President about, sort of, their life experiences, so the White House can then, you know, use in the Department of Education budget, send out God knows how many, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of letters to students, signed by the President saying thank you for writing me.
“This clearly has a political import, it’s clearly using the government’s budget in a way to advance the president personally. It’s the kind of thing that makes us — that makes all Americans uneasy about what the White House is doing. But they clearly, I would suspect, a dime to a dollar bet you, that they altered that speech. They certainly altered the study guides.”
