OK, finding a SECOND really good article took me a horribly long 3 minutes time.
What Would Obama Say?
TURNING A PHRASE Jon Favreau, chief speechwriter to Senator Barack Obama, at work the night of the New Hampshire primary.
COMMENT: HOLLY !!! He's the CHIEF SPEECHWRITER???!!! That means there's a few more. Who's the junior speechwriter on the Obama team? And who's the assistant speechmanager writer guy? Who's in charge of writing the open and final paragraphs?
quote:
AT the Radisson Hotel in Nashua, N.H., Jon Favreau sipped Diet Coke and munched on carrot sticks and crackers to pass the time. His boss, Senator Barack Obama, wandered in and out of the room.
Finally, results from the New Hampshire Democratic primary started coming in, surprising everyone. Hillary Clinton was pulling past Senator Obama, who had won the Iowa caucuses only five days earlier.
Mr. Favreau, the campaign’s 26-year-old head speechwriter, found himself in the hotel lounge with less than three hours to revise what was to have been a victory speech. What made it particularly strange was that his words were being challenged. Mrs. Clinton had helped turn her campaign around by discounting Mr. Obama’s elegant oratory, saying, “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.”
“To be honest,” Mr. Favreau said, “the first time I really stopped to think about how it felt was when he started giving the speech. I looked around at the senior staff, and they were all smiling. And I looked around the room and thought, ‘This is going to be O.K.’ ”
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.
Together they are working for a politician who not only is known for his speaking ability but also wrote two best-selling books and gave the much-lauded keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
“You’re like Ted Williams’s batting coach,” Mr. Favreau said.
But even Ted Williams needed a little help with his swing.
“Barack trusts him,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief campaign strategist. “And Barack doesn’t trust too many folks with that — the notion of surrendering that much authority over his own words.”
When he first met Mr. Obama, Mr. Favreau was 23, a recent graduate of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., near where he grew up. Mr. Obama was rehearsing his 2004 convention speech backstage, when Mr. Favreau, then a member of John Kerry’s staff, interrupted him: the senator needed to rewrite a line from his speech to avoid an overlap.
“He kind of looked at me, kind of confused — like, ‘Who is this kid?’ ” Mr. Favreau recalled.
Mr. Obama became his boss the following year. Mr. Favreau had risen to a job as a speechwriter on the Kerry campaign, but by then was unemployed. He was, he said, “broke, taking advantage of all the happy-hour specials I could find in Washington.”
Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s communications director, had known Mr. Favreau during the Kerry campaign, and recommended him as a writer.
Life was relatively quiet then, and Mr. Obama and Mr. Favreau had some time to hang out. When Mr. Obama’s White Sox swept Mr. Favreau’s beloved Red Sox three games to none in their American League 2005 division series, the senator walked over to his speechwriter’s desk with a little broom and started sweeping it off.
Mr. Favreau also used this time to master Mr. Obama’s voice. He took down almost everything the senator said and absorbed it. Now, he said, when he sits down to write, he just channels Mr. Obama — his ideas, his sentences, his phrases.
“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.”
Many Democratic candidates have attempted to evoke both John and Robert Kennedy, but Senator Obama seems to have had more success than most. It helps that Mr. Obama seems to have the élan that John Kennedy had, not to mention a photogenic family.
For his inspiration, Mr. Favreau said, “I actually read a lot of Bobby” Kennedy.
“I see shades of J.F.K., R.F.K.,” he said, and then added, “King.”
Not everyone is so enamored. Mr. Obama excels at inspirational speeches read from a teleprompter before television cameras, critics have noted, but many of his other speeches on the campaign trail have failed to electrify.
Ted Widmer, a historian at Brown University, said that Mr. Obama’s speeches “were perfect for getting to where he was early in the race, but I think now that we’re in a serious campaign, it would be helpful to hear more concrete proposals.”
“There’s more to governing, there’s more to being president, than speechwriting,” he added.
Mr. Favreau said that when he is writing, he stays up until 3 a.m. and gets up as early as 5. He hasn’t slept for more than six hours in as long as he can remember, he said.
Coffee helped him through the Iowa caucuses. Two days before the victory there, he walked across the street from the campaign’s Des Moines headquarters and cloistered himself inside a local cafe.
He and Mr. Obama had talked about the post-caucus speech for about 30 minutes, settling on a theme of unity and an opening line: “They said this day would never come.”
“I knew that it would have multiple meanings to multiple people,” Mr. Favreau said. “Barack and I talked about it, and it was one that worked for the campaign. There were many months during the campaign when they said he’d never win. And of course there was the day that would never come, when an African-American would be winning the first primary in a white state.”
In discussions about the speech, the issue of race never came up, Mr. Favreau said. But, he added, “I know I thought about it.”
As Senator Obama’s star has risen, so has Mr. Favreau’s. In New Hampshire, Mr. Favreau stood in the back of a gym watching his boss campaign when Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter to the current President Bush, introduced himself. He complimented him on the Iowa victory speech.
The campaign staff has started teasing Mr. Favreau about his newfound celebrity. Not that it’s any great pickup line. Mr. Favreau, who said he doesn’t have a girlfriend, observed somewhat dryly that “the rigors of this campaign have prevented any sort of serious relationship.”
“There’s been a few times when people have said, ‘I don’t believe you, that you’re Barack Obama’s speechwriter,’ ” he went on. “To which I reply, ‘If I really wanted to hit on you, don’t you think I’d make up something more outlandish?’ ”
He does have other things to worry about. “Can you get through this process and keep the core of yourself?” Mr. Favreau asked. “You know, we’re finding out. I’m confident he can. And I think I can, too.”
Magnetonium
quote:
Originally posted by Fir3start3r
Wow, it took you 2.345 seconds to sift through all the results and find this one interesting article?
Thats some watch you have...
I was being sarcastic - I am merely hinting that I wasnt making things up and Obama has a bunch of people who help write speeches for him. I just didnt feel like searching for the articles. I cant save every article that I read in the various media. So pardon me for my rudeness.
Fir3start3r
quote:
Originally posted by Magnetonium
I was being sarcastic - I am merely hinting that I wasnt making things up and Obama has a bunch of people who help write speeches for him. I just didnt feel like searching for the articles. I cant save every article that I read in the various media. So pardon me for my rudeness.
I was being sarcastic too.
Kiss and make up? :clown:
/I had no doubt he had people that wrote for him btw...
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by Fir3start3r
I was being sarcastic too.
Kiss and make up? :clown:
/I had no doubt he had people that wrote for him btw...
Well of course he does - he gives two speeches per day. The point was that the allegation that he doesn't write any of his own speeches (the original point Mag has since backed off of) is false. Think of the three most famous Obama speeches and look up who wrote them. Guess who? Barack did - the 2004 DNC speech was written on napkins by the man himself. His own campaign chair said he rejected offers of help on the race speech, instead opting to write the whole thing on his own. And his speech announcing his candidacy, made on the steps of the Illinois state capitol (like Lincoln's) - he wrote that too.
The normal day to day stump speeches are written in conjunction with a speech-writing team, and that's not that much different than any other politician. Though you can rest assured Obama has more creative control than Dubya ever did. But Obama reserves the big speeches for his pen only, and that was my original point.
SiLveR_NrGy_985
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
You can't be serious? First of all, Obama wrote those "scripts" that you refer to - they aren't somebody else's ideas, they are his own. Second of all... I'd take Hillary and John McCain over Kerry and Bush any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
you'd vote for a BUSH 2!?? this guy is a scumbag! in an all honesty like magnetonium said all these politicans are full of shyt! this whole illusion of right or left... we all know Hillary,Mccain,etc are all zionist pigs !!
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by SiLveR_NrGy_985
you'd vote for a BUSH 2!?? this guy is a scumbag! in an all honesty like magnetonium said all these politicans are full of shyt! this whole illusion of right or left... we all know Hillary,Mccain,etc are all zionist pigs !!
Originally posted by SiLveR_NrGy_985
in an all honesty like magnetonium said all these politicans are full of shyt! this whole illusion of right or left... we all know Hillary,Mccain,etc are all zionist pigs !!
does that include obama?
SiLveR_NrGy_985
quote:
Originally posted by jerZ07002
does that include obama?
apparently you've been following what he's doing so i dunno you tell me....
jerZ07002
quote:
Originally posted by SiLveR_NrGy_985
apparently you've been following what he's doing so i dunno you tell me....
i mean whether he's a full of zionist, in your opinion.
SiLveR_NrGy_985
quote:
Originally posted by jerZ07002
i mean whether he's a full of zionist, in your opinion.
well it appears that most of them are zionists and in order for them to be "electable" in this country its important to have the support of the israel lobby, for the pure manipulative interest of israel...
here is your answer at 02:37 OBAMA at AIPAC:
Christian fundamentalist Pastor for Israel:
jerZ07002
quote:
Originally posted by SiLveR_NrGy_985
well it appears that most of them are zionists and in order for them to be "electable" in this country its important to have the support of the israel lobby, for the pure manipulative interest of israel...
i can't argue with that. politicians in america are definitely subordinate to the israeli cause, which makes no sense to me. how 16 million people can influence 300 million..... :conf:
DJ Shibby
Or maybe he believes we should have guns in the aftermath of some future event. ;)
