Political Headline of the Day

From Wes Pruden:

PRUDEN: A crucial week for Obama's teleprompter

I've got to include some of the column as well:

This is a big week for the president's teleprompter. He's first taking it across the Potomac for a speech urging schoolchildren to wash their hands, study hard and stay in school.

Good advice for everyone, no doubt, and maybe the advice will stimulate the sale of soap to people who really need it. Politicians particularly should take to heart a presidential admonition to keep their hands clean. Who can argue with that? Democrats everywhere are looking for places where the applause will be at least polite, with no yelling, screaming and waving of hands. The Secret Service, which never sleeps, can keep its guns holstered at a high school in middle-class suburban Virginia, where the kids are usually unarmed and likely to pay attention to the rare president in their midst.

The reception Wednesday night on Capitol Hill, for the president's speech to an unusual joint session of Congress, will be a little different. There will be no one to throw a soft tomato or a rotten egg; this audience will be a wrack of frightened rabbits begging the president for a lifeline (or at least a carrot). Congress is back in town after a month on the Western front, and still befuddled and a little shellshocked from taking fire from angry constituents. Nobody wants what the president is selling, insofar as anybody can figure out exactly what he's selling. The magic elixir may be the president himself, and lately nobody's buying that, either.

Rarely have Americans spoken up with such bold energy and ferocious power, organized by amateurs in the grass roots disdainful of both parties, and the fright was more than enough to make congressmen wet their pants, many of them twice.

Mr. Obama, safe behind the presidential shield, nevertheless got a taste of constituent anger at a distance when he tried to recruit America's schoolkids into the Obama cult of hope, change, peace and other vaguely good stuff. Write a letter to yourself, his Education Ministry told the kids in "a lesson plan" distributed to classrooms across the country, and tell the president what you can do to help him. The operative word here, clearly, is "him." This sounded a lot like a cult of presidential personality to millions of American parents - the bigots, evildoers and Nazis of the fevered and frightened Democratic imagination. Promote your agenda, but not with my kids, the parents told the White House, loud and clear.

You can read the rest of it here.