Considering that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder testified on Capitol Hill last week about a ten-page bill he hadn’t even read, the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider set the bar kinda low for his Commencement Address at Boston University Sunday afternoon.

Holder didn’t disappoint.  (Text here.)

Let’s stipulate, as the lawyers say, that someone did Holder’s homework for him. His address was sprinkled with references to the BU beach, Allston basement parties, and “Stew-vee-two” (Student Village 2, BU’s luxury student residence complex that comes with an $8000 premium).

Holder’s address also featured the obligatory nod to BU alum Martin Luther King, Jr.

On the eve of his assassination, in a cramped Memphis church, he posed this question in his legendary “Mountaintop” speech, which began with a journey through the ages. At each stop – whether Mount Olympus or ancient Rome, Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation or Roosevelt’s call to fear only fear itself – Dr. King asked himself what era he would choose – if he could make such a choice – to be part of. His own, he decided, explaining that happiness comes from embracing the blessings and burdens of fate and the opportunities that accompany living in times of unprecedented challenge. “I know,” he said, “that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

In that same chronological spirit, Holder gave a shoutout to the BU Class of 1970, which had its commencement cancelled because of the violent outburst in the wake of that year’s Kent State killings.

“I love you all,” he said to the crowd at Nickerson Field, “but these are my people.”

(Fun fact to know and tell: Ted Kennedy was scheduled to deliver the BU Commencement Address in 1970. Talk about clueless.)

In the end, Eric Holder’s commencement address was mostly boilerplate. Appropriate, perhaps, in a year when most of the available jobs for college grads are in the boiler room of corporate America.

(Photo: Boston Globe)