As a speechwriter, I am sometimes asked why so many graduation addresses fall flat.

It’s a good question, and the best answer I can give is this: The speaker thinks the occasion is all about him or her, instead about the graduates. So the speaker luxuriates in the spotlight, while the graduates fidget impatiently, waiting to receive their hard-earned diplomas.

This is not to say that commencement speakers should never talk about themselves or their life experiences. If they have useful lessons to pass on to the graduates, they should by all means do so. But the focus should be on the young people, not the speaker.

The current issue of Speechwriter’s Newsletter reprints what might be called a model graduation speech. It was delivered by Sen. Barack Obama at Southern New Hampshire University on May 19.

Sen. Obama talks about himself in the course of his speech, but it is always to illustrate a life lesson he is trying to make to the graduates.

For example, he talks about a night of wild partying he enjoyed as an undergraduate. The partying got out of hand and the dorm was trashed. Indeed, the debris was so extensive that the next morning, when the cleaning ladies arrived, one of them was reduced to tears at the sheer enormity of task before her.

When one of Obama’s girlfriends heard about the incident, she told him: “That woman could have been my grandmother, Barack. She spent her days cleaning up after somebody else’s messes.”

Sen. Obama told the grads that that observation drove home for him the first lesson of growing up: The world doesn’t just revolve around you.

In telling that little story about his own journey to maturity, Sen. Obama sets up the audience for a profound observation about the relationship between the individual and society:

“I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all of those who helped you get to where you are, although you do have that debt.

“It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. And it’s because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential –- and become full-grown.”

I found the second paragraph particularly intriguing. Conservatives tend to emphasize individual responsibility; liberals tend to emphasize social responsibility. In one neat phrase, “our individual salvation depends on our collective salvation”, Sen. Obama suggests that individual responsibility and social responsibility are two sides of the same coin.

I believe he’s right. And I think the graduates took the lesson to heart.