"When Bush spoke to students, Democrats investigated, held hearings"

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/When-Bush-spoke-to-students-Democrats-investigated-held-hearings-57694347.html

The controversy over President Obama's speech to the nation's
schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at
Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President
George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from
Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was
just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not
only denounced Bush's speech -- they also ordered the General
Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top
Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing
on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after,
not before, the president's school appearance. The day after Bush
spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the
speech was carefully staged for the president's political benefit.
"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom
into a television studio and its students into props," the Post
reported.

With the Post article in hand, Democrats pounced. "The Department of
Education should not be producing paid political advertising for the
president, it should be helping us to produce smarter students," said
Richard Gephardt, then the House Majority Leader. "And the president
should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera,
action.'"

Democrats did not stop with words. Rep. William Ford, then chairman of
the House Education and Labor Committee, ordered the General
Accounting Office to investigate the cost and legality of Bush's
appearance. On October 17, 1991, Ford summoned then-Education
Secretary Lamar Alexander and other top Bush administration officials
to testify at a hearing devoted to the speech. "The hearing this
morning is to really examine the expenditure of $26,750 of the
Department of Education funds to produce and televise an appearance by
President Bush at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, DC,"
Ford began. "As the chairman of the committee charged with the
authorization and implementation of education programs, I am very much
interested in the justification, rationale for giving the White House
scarce education funds to produce a media event."

Unfortunately for Ford, the General Accounting Office concluded that
the Bush administration had not acted improperly. "The speech itself
and the use of the department's funds to support it, including the
cost of the production contract, appear to be legal," the GAO wrote in
a letter to Chairman Ford. "The speech also does not appear to have
violated the restrictions on the use of appropriations for publicity
and propaganda."

That didn't stop Democratic allies from taking their own shots at
Bush. The National Education Association denounced the speech, saying
it "cannot endorse a president who spends $26,000 of taxpayers' money
on a staged media event at Alice Deal Junior High School in
Washington, D.C. -- while cutting school lunch funds for our neediest
youngsters."

Lost in all the denouncing and investigating was the fact that Bush's
speech itself, like Obama's today, was entirely unremarkable. "Block
out the kids who think it's not cool to be smart," the president told
students. "If someone goofs off today, are they cool? Are they still
cool years from now, when they're stuck in a dead end job. Don't let
peer pressure stand between you and your dreams.