Monday night we kicked off season 5 of Bless the Mic with RNC chair Michael Steele. When I booked him back in February or March, I had no idea that we would be in the midst of these heated and often incivil debates. So there was lots of interest in his speech.

I was excited too, but for the first time, I missed a lecture. My father-in-law passed last Wednesday, and his funeral was Monday. I came back after the funeral, but with the weather in Atlanta causing major problems, my original flight was cancelled, so I just saw the last 5 minutes of the Q&A.

But the plan has been to have students run the lectures, so this was a true trial by fire! I have 3 juniors and 3 sophomores who serve as the team directors, and then 27 freshmen team members. So I was confident in them. I think the problem they had was too many people trying to fill in for me to give them instructions. I have to tell folks they they've got this.

So I didn't get to do introduction, so my stand in was our team director, Felicia White. I watched her speech and she did well.

I haven't watched Steele yet but most were impressed. We will have to revamp our Q&A as a young man was escorted out after trying to do a follow up. If I had been there I would have allowed him to do so, because Steele shot down his original argument, so I would have been curious to see if he could recover. But we'll keep improving.

The Prez