Obama Bad-mouths America Abroad —Again

Posted 11/18/2011 06:58 PM ET

Leadership: The president is at it again, bad-mouthing the U.S. abroad. Last week he told Australians that our kids are "behind" in education and that the solution is — what else? — more government spending. Let's unpack that.

To start, normal presidents don't go around to other countries telling the locals that their country's schoolchildren are underachievers. Not Obama. "A lot of poor children don't get the support they need when they're very young," Obama told a roomful of inquiring students down under. "So by the time they get to grammar school, they're behind."

From that, Australians can only take home the message that American students are slow-witted and that admiration for U.S. education is misplaced.

It's part of a pattern he has, of going abroad, calling American CEOs "lazy," bowing to despots, and delivering one "blame America first" apology after another.

But more to the point, Obama's bad-mouthing of U.S. kids smacks of domestic politics by repeating the tiresome complaint that U.S. taxpayers aren't shelling out enough for an education system that is already loaded.

In 2010, Obama lavished $63 billion on the U.S. Department of Education — twice what DOE got in 1997. Now he's asking for another $68 billion.

U.S. schoolteachers don't make enough money, Obama told the Australians, asking: "How do we pay them more?" Teachers, in fact, are already well-paid.

From them he's taking upward of $60 million campaign cash in 2012 courtesy of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers. That's on top of the $50 million they gave him in 2008.

No doubt about it — the bloated, bureaucracy-laden U.S. public school system is a wretched failure, and the failing student test scores are a domestic disgrace.

But they've come as a result of Obama's fealty to unions, waste and fraud at the government institutions. Instead of blaming U.S. schoolkids for this state of affairs, he might look at himself, his policies and the teachers who push them.