Not My Bailiwick

I had been bothered by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs even before he dismissed parents' concerns about Obama's speech to the nation's students as "silly season". When a politician is soliciting support nothing is more important than the schools and the classroom is given a certain sanctity (often sadly unmerited in public schools which have already become politicized by educators' unions and seem to be a means to transfer wealth to teachers who no longer are working for the great benefits but have virtual lifetime job security, regardless of competence, and as ABC's John Stossel pointed out, are now also well-paid, far in excess of their private or parochial school peers and much more than most American workers), but Gibbs simply dismisses parental fear as "silly season", mocking and contemptuous of millions of conservatives and of many others who do not wish to see the young further propagandized. Gibbs was flippant and haughty over the children that parents rightly regard as the largest responsibility and most precious gift they will ever have. So Gibbs who typically gives clueless a whole new meaning tells a large swath of the voting public that there is no nefarious significance to the speech but omits reference to a national lesson plan that was to accompany the broadcast asking the students what they could do to help Obama, not the nation, not their parents, not the school itself- but Obama. So Gibbs goes from a joke to a W. C. Fields-"go away" parents you and your petty concerns "bother me", after all it is only your children I am talking about. Gibbs should go-any controversial question and too frequently Gibbs has become John Banner from Hogan's Heroes-"I know nothing" which seems pretty apt in Gibbs' case. No Teflon Bill Clinton, Gibbs is the "artless dodger" and arrogant to boot. Gibbs lacks the tact and grace of most of his predecessors who were at least skillful in deflecting or evading questions that put the Presidency on the spot. Gibbs seems like he's kept in a West Wing broom closet or hermetically sealed in a jar in Funk and Wagnalls' basement as Johnny Carson used to say between his forays to make an ass of himself to the White House press corps. I am sure he is a Democrat but from his lack of guile, Gibbs seems to be speaking as an atavist to the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s, not in anti-immigrant sentiment, but because he literally seems lost on the podium. I wonder if there is such a thing as verbal GPS to help this over-his-head fellow out. Like so much of the Obama administration he speaks for, Robert Gibbs is a perfect failure.