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What Obama's Commencement Speeches Reveal

3 years ago
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Jill Lawrence
Jill Lawrence
Senior Correspondent
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There's often no better window on presidents and their times than what they say each year at college commencements. In one stark example, just compare George W. Bush's address at Yale in May 2001 with the speeches he gave in 2008.
The Yale speech was a light-hearted romp in which Bush defended his strange way with words ("I don't make verbal gaffes. I'm speaking in the perfect forms and rhythms of ancient haiku") and mocked his forgettable undergrad career. "To the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States," Bush said.
The jokey, self-deprecating tone was consistent with the candidate familiar to me and other journalists from the 2000 campaign trail. Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the transformation of Bush and his presidency.
As he put it seven years later in an unusually personal speech at Furman University, "The world has a way of helping you grow." For the 2008 graduation at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Bush delivered a sober address about "defeating hateful ideologies," advances in military technology and "the power of freedom to overcome tyranny."
President Obama's speeches this spring at Arizona State University, the University of Notre Dame and the U.S. Naval Academy are consistent with the candidate we all got to know last year. There's the call to service, the scolding tone about American excesses, the "let us reason together" approach to politics.
In three or seven years, when Obama delivers his final set of commencement addresses as an incumbent, we'll see if he's still railing against greed and stressing public service. We'll also see if his sense of humor, and his trademark insistence on civility and bipartisanship, can survive Washington's rough and tumble.
Here are five benchmarks he set this year.
He likes to tease.
ASU came in for relentless ridicule when it refused to give Obama an honorary degree because "his body of work is yet to come." Apparently it's not enough to write a best-selling autobiography that was reviewed as provocative, resonant, fluid, poignant and probing. Or to smash through the glass ceiling of prejudice to become not just a president but a historic figure.
In his ASU address, Obama gently twisted the knife. He joked that he would never again choose another team over the school's Sun Devils in his NCAA bracket. He also joked that the university's president and Board of Regents "will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."
He tweaked ASU again four days later at Notre Dame, where he received an honorary doctorate. "These honorary degrees are apparently pretty hard to come by," Obama said. "So far I'm only one for two as president."
He's a moralist.
Never mind that ASU ranks as a top-20 party school in the Princeton Review, or that the commencement crowd erupted in laughter, applause and cheers when Obama started an exhortation with "as you look into the mirror tonight after the partying is done..."
He was dead serious with these grads, urging them to reject materialism and embrace service – as a matter of values, as a way to cope with recession and as a path to direction and self-worth. Regardless of what you see when you look in that mirror, he said, "a troubled child might look at you and see a mentor. A homebound senior citizen might see a lifeline. The folks at your local homeless shelter might see a friend."
In his other speeches, Obama held up the students as exemplars of good citizenship. As a supporter of legal abortion, he sparked controversy and protests with his visit to a Catholic university , Notre Dame. He told the graduating class they had handled the situation with a "maturity and responsibility" that had inspired him.
At the naval academy, Obama told the new sailors and marines that their choice to serve is "a reminder and a challenge" to others. "America, look at these young men and women," he said. "These Americans have embraced the virtues that we need most right now: self-discipline over self-interest; work over comfort; and character over celebrity."
He's a guy's guy.
Bush did not talk about sports last year in commencement addresses at Furman, Texas A&M or the Air Force Academy. But Obama likes to bond over sports.
At Notre Dame, he said he was excited about the school's sponsorship of "the largest outdoor five-on-five basketball tournament in the world." He offered his services next year to a losing team called the Barack O'Ballers. "If you need a 6-foot-2 forward with a decent jumper, you know where I live," he said.
At ASU, there was applause when Obama mentioned the school's Sun Devils basketball team and more when he said: "No one thought a former football player stocking shelves at the local supermarket would return to the game he loved, become a Super Bowl MVP, and then come here to Arizona and lead your Cardinals to their first Super Bowl."
The chief executive did a straightforward pander at the naval academy. "I've admired your prowess on the football field," Obama said, and recalled presenting the team with its sixth straight Commander in Chief trophy.
Footnote for fellow sports-avoiders: That onetime supermarket shelf stocker is Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner. And the Commander in Chief trophy is awarded every year to the winner of a three-way series between the military, naval and air force academies.
He likes a challenge.
By accepting Notre Dame's invitation to speak, Obama deliberately dove into the abortion issue and the emotions it stirs. At the naval academy, he laid out his national security philosophy, which is under challenge by conservatives, and how he wants the new sailors and marines to carry it out.
Their role, Obama told his future fighters, is to protect the country but also to protect its Constitution; to project American power but also to "protect American principles and values when you pull into that foreign port, because for so many people around the world, you are the face of America."
Obama alluded to the daily drubbings he takes from former vice president Dick Cheney and others over his ban on torturing prisoners and his plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. "We reject the false choice between our security and our ideals. We can and we must and we will protect both," he said. The line won applause, if not cheers.
At ASU, Obama took the school's put-down of his resumé and turned it into the central theme of his speech. "I come to embrace the notion that I haven't done enough in my life," he said. "There's always more to do, always more to learn, and always more to achieve."
That goes for the ASU graduating class as well, Obama added. "Your own body of work is also yet to come," he said. It was the first of four times he used the phrase that had originated as a slight.
He's a practical pol.
ASU is in a state Democrats hope to start winning in presidential elections and believe they would have won last year if its senator, John McCain, had not been the Republican nominee.
Put Notre Dame in the consolidating gains category. It is in Indiana, a state Obama narrowly won after a 44-year Democratic drought. It also qualifies as outreach to Catholics, who have been an unreliable constituency for Democrats.
Obama won the Catholic vote 54 to 45 percent last year, despite his support for legal abortion. That was a reversal from 2004, when John Kerry – himself a Catholic – lost among Catholics. The Notre Dame appearance allowed Obama to build his image as a conciliatory, somewhat moderate voice on abortion.
The naval academy is in the capital of Maryland, a state that's already bright blue. Still, the locale did offer an opportunity to talk about the Navy SEALS' heroic rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips from pirates off the coast of Somalia.
Obama took that opportunity. And lest anyone forget, he is the one who authorized that rescue.
Tagged: barac, barack obama, BarackObama
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