President Obama took on a tough challenge when he decided to speak to K – 12 students across the country for twenty minutes today on the subject of working hard, setting goals, and staying in school to achieve them.  The age range alone is daunting enough; to say something relevant to 12^th graders, he risked terrifying the Kindergarteners.  If he talked to the Kindergarteners mano a mano, then the 12^th graders would be bored out of their already cynical minds.  School assemblies are notorious of old – a time for the deadbeats in the back of the room to snicker and hurl spitballs at each other and the girls in front of them. 

None of this makes for a particularly promising set of conditions for public speaking.  But then there was the political fallout in advance of the talk – Obama’s political foes, led by a particularly egregious specimen from Florida, decided that the best thing to do was to accuse the President of socialism even before they had seen the speech.  As a result, parents and school administrators around the country scrambled to protect their children against communist mental infiltration or worse, vowing to keep the children home and safe, presumably watching television with its mindless commercials, murder, mayhem, and sexual innuendo. 

If I were still in school, I would find the example set by the adults more alarming than anything that the President could actually say.

But what about the actual speech?  Was it worth the fuss?  What did the President say and how did he say it?

He began by talking about his own early schooling – and it was early in a couple of senses of the word.  For his early schooling in Indonesia, he couldn’t afford the private schools most Americans went to, so instead his mother taught him – at 4:30 every morning. 

From these unprepossessing beginnings, President-to-be Obama suffered other setbacks: 

My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in. 

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse. 

From there, the speech becomes anodyne boilerplate urging all students to stay in school, work hard, and be all they can be.  The President even holds up the example of 3 students who had it much tougher than most and yet still managed to succeed: 

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall. 

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

All credit to these estimable people; nonetheless the section reminded me of when my grandmother used to tell me that other people had it much worse, so I shouldn’t complain.  I never knew what to say.  I felt vaguely resentful of those people, and I still wanted to complain.  Maybe today’s youth are more emotionally mature; if not, Jazmin, Adoni, and Shantell are in for some hazing. 

Overall, the speech lacks punch and originality.  It lacks stories, real stories that take listeners somewhere and inspire them emotionally rather than preaching at them.  I’d give it a ‘B’.  President Obama should get full credit for doing the speech at all, and his opponents should let up on this one.  It won’t turn anyone into a socialist.