2020 hopefuls get failing grade for commencement speeches – By David Siders and Daniel Strauss (politico.com) / July 1 2018
In place of soaring rhetoric and enduring oratory, college graduates got a dose of banality.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/01/graduation-speeches-2020-elections-689499
Elizabeth Warren told Lesley University graduates in Massachusetts that she suspected they were hungover and actively swiping for dates on Tinder. Terry McAuliffe drew cheers at the University of Richmond when he promised to speak for no more than 10 minutes. And at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, John Hickenlooper recounted his childhood nicknames — “Chicken Cooper” and “Poopin’ Scooper” — and resorted to quoting Stephen Colbert.
The college commencement speech once offered politicians a rare platform for soaring rhetoric and reflection. But for the class of prospective 2020 presidential candidates, the recently concluded graduation season went down as a dud.
Rhetorically, sighed Craig Smith, a former presidential speechwriter, “I think we’re falling on hard times.”
For decades, presidents and presidential hopefuls approached the microphone at the nation’s colleges and universities with an elevated air. Franklin Roosevelt, campaigning for president in 1932, famously called for “bold, persistent experimentation” in his commencement address at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. President John F. Kennedy delivered his “strategy of peace” speech at American University’s commencement in 1963. A year later, President Lyndon B. Johnson outlined his “Great Society” in a speech at the University of Michigan.
It’s not that anyone expected enduring oratory at a moment of angry, debased political rhetoric. But what stood out about this year’s speeches is that they hardly survived a single news cycle, much less the test of time.
In Time magazine’s compilation of “10 of the Best Pieces of Advice from 2018 Commencement Speakers,” only two American politicians, Hillary Clinton and retiring GOP Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, made the list. And among potential presidential candidates, the most noteworthy speech was one that wasn’t given – when California Sen. Kamala Harris, cancelled plans to speak at University of California, Berkeley’s commencement in solidarity with university workers embroiled in a labor dispute.
For politicians on college campuses in recent years, said Smith, a former speechwriter for President Gerald Ford, “I think they’re all too sensitive to a cynical generation of students that are hooked on text messaging and fast messages and 90 seconds of a news story and no more, so they’re trying to adapt to that, instead of creating an expectation in their audience for a much better speech to celebrate their graduation.”
Ted Widmer, who was a speechwriter in the Clinton White House, said, “It is increasingly rare that we hear a genuinely new thought in one of these things. It’s been a while.”
Even as recently as a decade ago, politicians were making marks in their appearances on college campuses. In 2007, during the last election cycle in which aspiring Democrats stood before graduating students with a Republican in the White House, Hillary Clinton used a speech at Dillard University to excoriate the Bush administration for its response to Hurricane Katrina and called rebuilding New Orleans an “American obligation.” That same year, then-Sen. Barack Obama implored graduates at Southern New Hampshire University that America was “counting on you to restore the image of America around the world.”
“The commencement speeches that have stood the test of time spoke to their audiences as future leaders who were going to have to engage in the real and complex challenges of the world … and I fear that some of that has been lost,” said Jeff Nussbaum, a former Joe Biden and Al Gore speechwriter.
Nussbaum, a partner at the speechwriting firm West Wing Writers, said, “I don’t know that the commencement speech is dead, necessarily … but it seems that fewer graduation speakers are aiming to engage and inspire with really big, bold thoughts. And so, instead, they’re attempting to entertain and impart some wisdom from their own personal experiences, and they’re doing so with varying success.”
Fearful of alienating whole sections of the arenas or sprawling lawns where graduates gathered this spring, rising Democrats rarely mentioned Donald Trump by name, instead offering thinly veiled criticisms of the Republican president.
In a meditation on “navigating borders” at Southern New Hampshire University in May, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti challenged the idea “that there are two Americas — there’s the rural and urban divide, the immigrant and native-born, the coasts and the heartland, red and blue.”
He said, “I do believe there are two Americas, but it’s none of those – it’s Washington, D.C., and the rest of us.”
Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, warned graduates at Bentley University outside of Boston that they were not living in “normal times,” while Warren, the senator from Massachusetts, said, “As a nation, we face a deep set of challenges: the rich and powerful have hijacked our government … A rigged system continues to leave too many families behind.”
Following a model perfected by President Barack Obama, the politicians-turned-graduation speakers of 2018 have leaned heavily on their biographies to attempt what Nussbaum described as a merging of “their own personal histories with this moment in our national history.”
“They say that every good commencement speech should connect with the students in the audience who plan to follow the speaker’s career path,” Warren said. “So, if you plan to get married at 19, throw a full scholarship down the drain, have some kids, get yourself back in school, finish your education and end up in the U.S. Senate, listen up, I’m your gal.”
Recalling that he was bullied as a youth, Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado, said, “I understood how it felt to be left out or left behind.” At Kean University in New Jersey, Sen. Cory Booker spoke of racial injustices endured by his family, while McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia, recounted starting a driveway sealing business as a 14-year-old.
“Never ever take yourself too seriously, and always stay positive. People want to be with winners, not whiners,” McAuliffe said at the University of Richmond. “There’s too many lemon suckers in this country … At a time when our nation seems to be having fault lines and people are getting in their corners, forget all that. Work together. And do what you want to do. It’s your life. As I always say, you only live once. I have a motto: sleep when you’re dead.”
Bob Shrum, a longtime political strategist who served on multiple Democratic presidential campaigns, called the commencement speech a “time-honored way for people to get out there and provide an additional place to be seen and heard other than partisan events.” And for potential presidential candidates in a midterm election year, the stakes are relatively low.
Doug Rubin, a Massachusetts-based Democratic strategist who has advised both Warren and Patrick, described commencement addresses as “an opportunity to test some themes and test some messages and try to deliver a little bit” in a “pretty friendly environment.”
And the commencement speakers’ audiences, while hopeful for a quick exit, may no longer be expecting very much from a commencement speech.
“They’ve never been particularly riveting,” said Ben Krauss, managing partner for Fenway Strategies and former speechwriter for Clinton and Tim Kaine. “Speeches in general are sort of an artificial moment where you have one person in front of everyone who may or may not have to be there, and then the commencement version of that artificial setting is even more exaggerated in how boring it can be.”
However, Krauss said, in recent years “they’ve gotten maybe on aggregate more boring.”
He added, “As time moves forward, that’s just more and more people having said the same thing.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/01/graduation-speeches-2020-elections-689499
