After spending most of his speech cataloging the world's most pressing problems, Clinton pivoted to a deeply personal conviction he'd held since he was the graduates' age. He recalled how people had been betting against the United States since George Washington — dismissed as a mediocre surveyor with bad false teeth — took on King George. Abraham Lincoln was called a baboon in an Illinois newspaper editorial. Yet nobody remembers the naysayers. Clinton insisted that giving in to cynicism and pessimism is the easy way out — a self-fulfilling prophecy that guarantees failure. Real courage, he argued, lies in looking at overwhelming problems and choosing optimism anyway.