This weekend, President Obama will give a speech that very likely won't be about the controversies of the moment.
Every year, a few schools get the president of the United States as their commencement speaker. And this Sunday, at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Obama will get an opportunity to take a step back and describe the big picture.
The graduation speeches that the president gives almost seem to be his real State of the Union addresses. An official State of the Union speech reads like an annual to-do list. But in commencement speeches, Obama talks about where the country stands and where it's going.
And his assessment has changed over the past four years.
Here's what he said at Arizona State in 2009:
Compare that with Ohio State earlier this month:
Here's what he said at the Naval Academy in 2009:
And, in contrast, at the Air Force Academy in 2012:
Since Obama took office, he has delivered 14 commencement addresses. Among them: four at military schools. Two at high schools. One community college. One historically black college. And one women's college.
Sometimes the president road-tests lines in these speeches that come up later in more high-profile venues. Remember this, from Obama's second inaugural?
That line echoed for days, tying together historic fights for women's suffrage, civil rights and gay equality.
Turns out, he used the same line eight months earlier in a commencement speech at Barnard College:
That speech at a women's school focused on gender equality. And when Obama visited a historically black school, Hampton University, in 2010, the commencement speech focused on African-American struggles:
Many of these speeches are tailored for the specific group of graduates in the crowd. At Miami Dade College, where 90 percent of the students are minorities, in 2011 Obama talked about immigration :
While these speeches each have a unique message, there are also universal themes. The idea of unity and community runs through every one of Obama's 14 commencement addresses, including this one at Notre Dame in 2009.
This is the brand of politics that Obama has always aspired to, but that he so rarely attains in Washington. A few times every spring, he gets to leave the capital and tell Americans: We're all in this together.
Obama pushes these values of community on a large scale, and a small one.
Sometimes in these speeches when Obama talks about society and citizenship, he argues that government is the vehicle to implement those values. That's a core democratic idea that Obama has always promoted, including at the University of Michigan in 2010.
In a way, this paean to citizenship, shared responsibility and government has become the central idea of the Obama presidency. It was a major part of his campaign as well.
These ideas are rooted in Obama's work as a community organizer. And today he hopes these ideas will energize people to move lawmakers.
This is a project that Obama has been pushing since long before he reached the White House.
But today, with controversies shining a harsh light on federal bureaucrats from the Internal Revenue Service to the Justice Department, convincing these young Americans they should trust their government may be a harder sell than at any time in the past four years.
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