It’s a Kid Who Writes Obama’s Speeches
Posted by Ted Hopton on January 20, 2008
Barack Obama is well-known for his stirring and inspiring oratory, so it was interesting to me when I read this article, “What Would Obama Say?” about his chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, who is only 26 years old.
Mr. Favreau, or Favs, as everyone calls him, looks every bit his age, with a baby face and closely shorn stubble. And he leads a team of two other young speechwriters: 26-year-old Adam Frankel, who worked with John F. Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, who, at 30, calls himself the “elder statesman” of the group and who helped write the Iraq Study Group report as an assistant to Lee H. Hamilton.
I also liked the behind-the-scenes look at how the candidate’s message is crafted (I always liked that aspect of “The West Wing,” a TV show I miss). There’s more:
“The trick of speechwriting, if you will, is making the client say your brilliant words while somehow managing to make it sound as though they issued straight from their own soul,” said the writer Christopher Buckley, who was a speechwriter for the first President Bush. “Imagine putting the words ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ into the mouth of Ron Paul, and you can see the problem.”
Ironically, this posting is tied closely to the last one I made (Fired Up) — just a coincidence that I found both articles in the NYT today.
