Obama delivers message of optimism to class of ’13
View(s):COLUMBUS, Ohio — Acknowledging that commencement addresses are no place for partisanship, President Obama nonetheless skirted close to that political line on Sunday, telling graduates at Ohio State University to ignore antigovernment voices that “gum up the works” and instead aspire to be citizens who value both individual rights and community responsibilities.
“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems,” Mr. Obama told the crowd at the Ohio State commencement ceremony. “Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works; they’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”
Ohio State graduates, their families and friends — almost 60,000 people in all — turned the university’s huge football stadium into a sea of red and gray, the university’s colors. Mr. Obama noted that it was his fifth visit to the campus in the past year, reflecting the importance of Ohio and young voters to his re-election in November.
Obama urged Ohio State graduates to pursue causes for the greater good.
But this was the president’s first trip here in his young second term, which has already faced setbacks in Congress over the budget and legislation to reduce gun violence and is now confronting the escalating violence in the Middle East and a push to overcome Republican opposition to an overhaul of immigration law that would provide a path to citizenship to about 11 million people who are in the country illegally.
Mr. Obama will make another trip outside Washington this week, this time to Austin, Tex., to press for long-blocked initiatives supporting infrastructure projects, education and a higher minimum wage. But in the commencement speech on Sunday, the first of three that he plans to give during graduation season, Mr. Obama mostly steered clear of those subjects and others that he and Republicans are fighting over. His address was both a pitch for good citizenship and an optimistic message as the economy recovers from the most serious recession since the Great Depression.
“While things are still hard for a lot of people, you have every reason to believe that your future is bright,” Mr. Obama said. “You’re graduating into an economy and a job market that is steadily healing.”
The president described the graduates’ generation as having a “sense of service” that “makes me optimistic for our future.” Ohio State’s class of 2013, he noted, included military veterans, volunteers for the Peace Corps and Teach for America, and entrepreneurs who are already running start-up companies.
Their lives, he said, started as the cold war was ending and the Internet age was beginning, and they came of age as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, wars, recession and technological advances transformed America.
President Obama addressing Ohio State graduates on Sunday. “You’ve been tested and you’ve been tempered,” he told them.
“You’ve been tested and you’ve been tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we’d see when we sat where you sit,” he said. “And yet despite all this, or perhaps because of it, yours has become a generation possessed with that most American of ideas — that people who love their country can change it for the better.”
Citizenship, he said, is sometimes seen “as a virtue from another time, a distant past — one that’s slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition above all else, a society awash in instant technology that empowers us to leverage our skills and talents like never before, but just as easily allows us to retreat from the world. And the result is that we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share as one American family.”
Mr. Obama urged the graduates to find not just a career but a cause for the greater good. Perhaps, he said, they might even run for public office.
“I promise you, it will give you a tough skin. I know a little bit about this,” he said. “President Wilson once said, ‘If you want to make enemies, try to change something.’-nytimes.com
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