Obama Blames US High Schools For Dissing Him

Talk about change. Last year, over 1,000 American high schools participated in a contest to have Obama deliver their commencement address. The White House has now extended this year’s application deadline, given that only 68 schools seem to have elected to participate. The reason? Well, it can’t be Obama’s sagging popularity, so they say it’s obvious that the schools are simply procrastinating! Typical, Obama, when things get bad, blame someone else.

On top of that, the administration is pulling out all the stops to get Democrats and even the Cabinet to put the arm on schools, hopefully getting them to step up. Great, it isn’t as if our government has anything more important to do right now, what with the Middle East imploding and the American economy continuing to lag. So much for the change Obama wanted us to believe in.

The White House is ramping up an effort to promote a nationwide competition to decide which high school wins a commencement speech by President Obama.

An internal White House memo indicates that the White House is facing a shortage of applications less than a week before the deadline.

The competition was extended from the February 25 deadline until Friday, March 11 after few schools met the original application deadline. CBS News has learned a White House Communications Office internal memo dated February 22 noted “a major issue with the Commencement Challenge.”

“As of yesterday we had received 14 applications and the deadline is Friday,” the memo said. The memo also urged recipients to, “please keep the application number close hold.”

A follow-up memo on February 28 reported receipt of 68 applications. Noting the competition among more than 1,000 schools last year, the memo said, “Something isn’t working.” It called on staffers to ask “friendly congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral offices” to encourage schools to apply.

“We should also make sure the Cabinet is pushing the competition out to their lists,” the memo said. The note reiterated, “We do not want the actual application number out there (we didn’t release the number of applications we received last year until after the submission period)-so folks should not use it in their pitches.”