The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [62]
To quell the furor, the White House released the text of the president’s speech ahead of time. The message was as benign as they come. Urging the nation’s schoolchildren to do their homework, pay attention in class, and stay in school, the president told them that they needed to take responsibility for their own success: “That’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.”2
The president said he understood that not everyone had it easy. He reminded the students that he was raised by a single mother who woke him each morning at 4:30 to do his homework. He did not want children to use their own tough situations as an excuse: “At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life—what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home—none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school . . . There is no excuse for not trying.” Obama linked the message of responsibility with the iconic symbolism of the American Dream: “Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you, because here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
In the end, the controversy about Obama’s address was simply partisan hysteria (although he hasn’t done it again). He did not indoctrinate the minds of the nation’s youth with visions of socialism. He used his bully pulpit to emphasize a core tenet of the American narrative: the need for personal responsibility.
Like many hinterland politicians before him, Obama came to Washington wanting to build and rely on a new era of bipartisanship and common ground. In his first news conference as president-elect, he said that he was “not going to anticipate problems” and that he was “going to go in there with a spirit of bipartisanship.”3
If that was in fact an honest hope at any point, it had been smothered by the realities of Washington before his first year in office was done. We live in an era when a member of Congress can yell “You lie!” at the president in a speech about health care and a Supreme Court justice can mouth “Not true” during the State of the Union.4 In this political context, Obama’s speech to schoolchildren took advantage of the one thing that politicians of all stripes seem to agree on: personal responsibility.
“Personal responsibility” is the safest of political mantras. It is the last foothold of bipartisanship. Its focus on the power of individuals to make their own way is linked to the American Dream, the belief that “here in America, you write your own destiny.”
No one disagrees with the idea of personal responsibility. That is, no one but me. Before you run to get your tar and feathers, let me explain.
1.
When I graduated from college, back in the 1980s, I headed west to San Francisco. As a small-town kid from Kentucky, I was a little wide eyed in such a beautiful and worldly city, and the four years I lived there were pivotal for me in learning how to be a grown-up. I had a decent job but only a handful of friends. For the first time in my life, I was on my own.
So I bought a motorcycle. I needed transportation and did not have money for a car, so I asked around and found a used Kawasaki street bike, red and fast. I had ridden dirt bikes as a teenager, but navigating Nob Hill and the Pacific