Whether they’re running for president or a state House seat, Republicans in need of campaign cash often find their way to Bill Diamond’s Palm Beach home.

Florida Attorney General and 2010 governor candidate Bill McCollum will be the latest GOP office-seeker to belly up to Diamond’s political ATM when he attends a fund-raising lunch there Wednesday.

A veteran of New York City Republican politics, the 73-year-old Diamond co-owns a real estate business and was elected to the Palm Beach town council this year.

He was a regional administrator for the U.S. General Services Administration under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, then was former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s commissioner of administrative services from 1994 to 2001.

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The partisan dustup over President Obama’s planned nationwide address to schoolchildren next week has inspired some speculation about what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot:

What if this were a Republican president, perhaps one named Bush, trying to drum up support for one of his programs? Would liberal school administrators even allow the kids to watch it? Would Democratic parents pull their children from the classroom that day?

Well, maybe we don’t have to guess. It turns out that then-President George H.W. Bush made a nationally televised speech to students on Oct. 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C., urging them to “make it your mission to get a good education” and to “block out the kids who think it’s not cool to be smart.” (The president’s sound bite of the day was apparently, “I can’t understand for the life of me what’s so great about being stupid.”)

Update: As a Palm Beach Post reader has helpfully pointed out, then-President Ronald Reagan spoke live to students nationwide in May 1986. And it seems that the first President Bush also made a 15-minute televised speech in 1989 urging students not to use drugs.

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