By Lee A. Daniels

Finally, President Obama has given his unnecessarily much-anticipated speech to America’s school children, and  – big surprise – it’s turned out to be the kind of speech most kids hear from their parents, teachers, school officials and every adult within earshot at least once a week.  Work hard, be responsible and make America great.

It’s early yet; but I’m willing to bet the President’s advice — laced with stories of teens who are succeeding in school and his confessing that sometimes as a youth he “got in more trouble than I should have ” — won’t send America’s youth rushing to the barricades of socialism.

But then, of course, the bizarre claims about Obama’s motives for giving the speech made by some white politicos and parents in recent weeks never had anything to do with the substance of the President’s talk. They were aimed at President Obama himself.

Oh, I’ve no doubt that some of those white parents who declared Obama was trying to indoctrinate their kids with socialists tenets sincerely believed it. I’ve always also believed that during the Jim Crow era some segregationists sincerely convinced themselves that blacks’ pursuit of their rights was nothing more than a communist plot.

But this much-ado-about-nothing controversy wasn’t driven to such an extreme dimension by the unconscious or subconscious anxieties of some white parents. Rather, it was the product of a calculated right-wing political gambit: the stoking of maximum ideological polarization.

That’s a phrase I came across in an April 2006 article in the New York Times about the forced resignation from Congress of Texas Rep. Tom DeLay, the fierce, take-no-prisoners GOP House majority leader and a driving force behind the conservative movement’s decade-long dominance of the political landscape.

Referring to DeLay and the fierce partisan battles between the parties (including the attempt to impeach President Clinton) he led for the GOP, one former congressional colleague said, “He was the leader of the Republican Party at a time of maximum ideological polarization between the parties, and he was successful in that era. I think that era is coming to an end. What will replace it, I don’t know.”

The answer to what would replace it came shortly. DeLay’s resignation was provoked by the backwash of multiple scandals rocking the GOP. Those scandals would in the Congressional mid-term elections that November provoke an angry electorate to overwhelmingly vote Democratic – giving the latter control of Congress and opening the door for Barack Obama to run for the presidency.

In doing so, the American electorate had declared its desire to put maximum ideological polarization – the appeal to people’s worst instincts – on the shelf and resurrect the old-fashioned competitive but win-some-lose-some style of American politics.

Since Obama’s election, however, the conservative movement has been trying to take its revenge against both by going back to the future: by reviving the stratagem of maximum ideological polarization as its route to political success.

That’s the reason for GOP leadership’s rejection of Obama’s overtures for some measure of bipartisan cooperation in Congress; its early claims that Judge Sonia Sotomayor was a racist; and its refusal to condemn the vituperative and loony conspiracy-theory attacks on Obama and his proposals by the conservative talk-radio echo chamber. Their thinking is that if they just play the maximum ideological polarization game long enough and hard enough, they can make some voters forget what shape the country was in before Obama took office eight months ago.

Hopefully, the majority of American voters hasn’t forgotten the painful lessons it learned then.

Lee A. Daniels is Communications Director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.