The Bell Curve:

Last week in this space I said that I felt the flap over the failure to show President Obama’s pep talk for school kids in real time offered an opportunity to explain to Newport-Mesa students the dual role of our president as the chief executive of our government and as the temporary holder of an office that demands deep respect.

After watching Obama’s speech to an assembled Congress three days later, I had a new slant. It seemed clear to me that the people who make our laws need a refresher course on respect more than the kids do. That change of focus wasn’t all because a congressman from South Carolina called the president a liar, loudly in mid-speech. It was aided and abetted by audience members who rolled their eyes or fiddled with their laptops or chatted with their neighbors and stood up for applause only as if they were in great pain.

Don’t tell me that politics are a mean rotten business that either toughens or destroys you, and where respect is as rare as a mea culpa from Dick Cheney. And if you can’t stand a little heat — like Rep. Joe Wilson’s gaffe — you should look for a nice place to teach. Those are all givens that are set aside, even. In the extremities of politics, when you invite someone to your home, even when home is the federal House of Representatives, and Confederates are entertaining Yankees, you treat guests with respect. That’s as close as pols come to a sacrosanct rule, which is why Wilson’s outburst may make him a hero to Rush Limbaugh but a real drag to the professionals at the top of his party who would like it to all go away.

Meanwhile there have been a lot of computer explorations to find out if Wilson is a real person or an insurance company plant. He’s real. His roots are deep in South Carolina where the Confederate flag flew proudly over the state capitol until 2000. He’s a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who once seceded from the United States, which might give Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs some concern about his legitimacy as a U.S. citizen.

Joe’s real name is Addison Graves Wilson. He was born and grew up in Charleston, got a law degree from the University of South Carolina, and served on the staff and was mentored in politics and philosophy by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, who conducted the longest filibuster in Senate history against the 1957 civil rights bill and ran for decades on the platform that the South really won the Civil War.

Wilson has been an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve for most of his adult life, once as the only active Guard member serving in Congress. His four sons — all Eagle Scouts — have followed a similar path to the military. Although Wilson’s entire family enjoys single-payer government health care through their military connections, according to Newsweek magazine Wilson has voted 11 times against health care for vets and repeatedly in favor of cutting funds to the Veterans Administration.

Wilson served for 17 years — with perfect attendance, notes his in-house biography proudly — as a state senator before he was elected to Congress in 2001. He has served there since with little notoriety until his 15 minutes of fame last week. Now his party leaders have to either build on his emergence as a hero to those who still dream of secession or a boor who sees respect as a sign of weakness to get clear of. While the party leaders debate this choice, I’d like to be helpful by pointing out an opportunity the super-conservatives might be overlooking.

Although the Republican team that will carry the presidential colors of the GOP in 2012 has been shaping up nicely since Sarah Palin made herself available to head the ticket, the search for her running mate was troubling until the perfect political companion for Palin stood up and called the president of the United States a liar in the congressman’s own home.

Magically, Palin was handed not just a running mate but a soul mate as well. A dream team. And there’s no problem about where they were born although Rush Limbaugh might want to double check whether Wilson’s antecedents had truly seceded.

Which brings us back, not at all logically, to Wilson’s disrespect to the office of his president and mine and how that might be used as a lesson to our children.

It was my intent when I started this piece to get into a question that hasn’t been explored e.g.: What was the extent and nature of the pressure put on our school authorities over the treatment of the Obama talk to our students, and how — if at all — did it influence their decisions?

My telephone calls to the superintendent’s office over several days in search of answers were not returned. So we’ll press on to see whether any precedents have been set in bringing pressure to bear on educational decisions.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.