My son will graduate from Denison University in Granville, Ohio. In the next few weeks, commencement speeches will be delivered to hundreds of thousands of spectators at approximately 4,100 colleges and 37,000 high schools in the United States, not to mention middle and elementary schools. When my son was in the 8 th grade I had the privilege of preparing and coaching the graduation speakers of Kent Middle School in Kentfield, California. The speakers were terrific, and those speeches were everything a good graduation speech should be: personal, hopeful, reflective, inspiring,

For those that don’t know the story, in 2004, Connie Culp, a 40 year old waitress from Ohio, was shot in the face at point blank range with a shotgun, by her husband.  Connie was the recipient of the first facial transplant in the United States, and bravely faced cameras for the first time yesterday.  Click here to view the embedded video. Thousands of messages appear every second, and nearly every one of them disappears just as quickly. 

In an earlier speech in Ohio, Palin said: Well, it's always, though, safer in politics to avoid risk, to just kind of go along with the status quo . The RNC's choice of a black background for its speakers, with a large-screen streaming video of landscapes of the United States, didn't help. Earlier this year, I noted the double-edged sword of image for female political candidates, particularly in regard to their speaking style. Here again is an excerpt from Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking , about: