Barack Obama addressed 90,000 people Saturday at the Big House, the University of Michigan’s football stadium, where he was greeted warmly by the largest crowd to hear the president since the inauguration. Among the nearly 10,000 graduates was my daughter Kayla.
The university is a place of innovation, stability, and optimism in a state that has endured more negative consequences of the recession, and the underlying transitional factors that caused it, than any other. The evidence list is long and familiar. Detroit is losing 10,000 residents a year, and is home to less than half as many residents as it had in the 1950s. The state is just one of two — Rhode Island is the other — that is losing population. Joblessness is high. Incomes are low. Most of Saturday’s graduates will begin their careers outside Michigan, where we’ve been sending our best  since 1990. For two decades in a row, Michigan has been a national leader in exporting its brightest young minds.
Michigan voted for Obama because he represented hope and because his calm, self-effacing, and candid style is appreciated even though the state is fueled by division. Blacks from whites. Urban from suburban. North from south. Detroit from Grand Rapids. Conservatives from liberals. Front office from shop floor. Michigan from Michigan State. Perhaps that’s why Obama, who’s confronting upheaval and resistance at every turn — war, the economy, jobs, political opposition in both parties, climate change, energy, and an expanding environmental disaster in the Gulf — chose Michigan as the place to address how Americans behave in the public arena. His speech, he said, was prompted by a kindergarten student who sent him a letter that asked, “Are people being nice?”
