Mara Gordon | Power of rhetoric

Last week, I went to my commencement. Or at least I'm pretending I did.

It was everything I wanted in a great graduation speech. A famous, influential speaker. Inspiring rhetoric. I left with a sense that no matter what I set my mind to, I would be able to change the world.

I'm talking, of course, about everyone's favorite hypothetical graduation speaker, the one-day first husband himself: Bill Clinton. I could practically hear pomp and circumstance playing in the background as Clinton took the stage at Irvine Auditorium, the podium draped in elaborate floral displays.

He thanked several Penn professors and a Penn surgeon who accompanies him on international trips.

Even College senior David Helfenbein - a family friend of the Clintons - got a shout-out for his work on Hillary's campaign. With this many connections to Penn, I'm surprised we couldn't get him to come to our real commencement ceremony. Instead, Clinton was speaking as part of a University symposium on "Kerner Plus 40" - an examination of race relations in America, 40 years after the publication of the influential Kerner Commission on civil rights.

Might not seem like ideal fodder for a commencement speech, but it's exactly what I would have wanted on May 19.

"The dramatic increase in diversity in the United States, which you can see with a glance around the crowd today, has helped us move closer to one America," Clinton said last Thursday to the people lucky enough to get a ticket. But "in the last decade, inequality has returned with a vengeance. Widespread and persistent poverty is found in every urban community in America."

It was the perfect blend of praise for Penn and a call to action. Clinton was willing to speak frankly about race, giving the talk a sense of honesty and urgency that few graduation speeches ever achieve.

There has been progress "inconceivable when I was a boy growing up in the segregated South," he said. "We're getting there. The problem is, we're getting there with one stratum of our society and leaving the rest out."

The quotations don't do him justice. Maybe I was a bit star-struck, but I saw why people say he's a "genius" rhetorician. He was humble: "I don't have all the answers!" He was nonpartisan: "I'm not saying anything political today!"

Yet he didn't seem afraid to take a stand on the concrete issues - like health care and prison reform - that our generation has the ability to change.

It was unfortunate, then, that our actual commencement speaker happened to publish an op-ed piece in The New York Times on the very same day.

Instead of a vision for change, Michael Bloomberg offered Times readers a moderate approach almost as boring as his tenure as New York City mayor.

"I will continue to work to steer the national conversation away from partisanship and toward unity; away from ideology and toward common sense; away from sound bites and toward substance," he wrote.

But we didn't see any of that common sense or substance in his op-ed piece. Instead, we got 700 words that basically boiled down to this: I'm not running for president. If I were, I'd be good at it - but I'm not going to tell you how.

Please don't let him sound anything like that when he addresses the class of 2008 on Franklin Field.

Good graduation speakers are a little more controversial than Bloomberg. They're visionaries who have changed the world in big ways - not bland independents who advocate for ambiguous things like "meaningful progress."

I'm not just looking for a liberal. Brilliant conservatives like columnist Bill Kristol or iconic businessmen like Warren Buffet would've delivered an address with the passion we all want.

Good speakers make us feel, if only for an hour, that our Penn education has equipped us to be just as imaginative as they are.

Last Thursday, Bill Clinton helped me believe that.

And in May, I guess Michael Bloomberg will help us believe we can all become just as tragically middle-of-the-road as he is.

Mara Gordon is a College senior from Washington, DC. Her e-mail is gordon@dailypennsylvanian.com. Flash Gordon appears on Wednesdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.