Ben Rhodes, the 31 year old creative writer turned speechwriter , has three weeks to craft “the most anticipated foreign policy address” of Obama’s presidency.
And it may be a wild ride. In yesterday’s article, Politico chronicled Rhodes’ speechwriting history with the President:
North Korea fired a missile hours before Obama was set to deliver a nuclear nonproliferation speech that Rhodes had been working on for a month. There was Obama, on Air Force One, tweaking his address to the Turkish Parliament while en route to Ankara. And on the flight to Strasbourg, France, the president was still tinkering with the speech he would give at a town hall as soon as he landed.
“He was making changes up to the last minute, which is not unusual, and so I literally had to do those in the back of the motorcade to this site and then find a zip drive that could plug into the teleprompter,” Rhodes recalled in an interview. “He likes to work on things until the end because he likes to get them just the way he wants them. So sometimes that’s easy, sometimes it’s you in the back of a van with a laptop on your knee hoping your battery doesn’t die.”
Said senior adviser David Axelrod: “Everybody here sort of lives with the reality that the president is the best speechwriter in the group.”
…The process for the Cairo address will begin this week in the same way it has for other foreign policy speeches Rhodes has written since the Inauguration: Obama will summon Axelrod; Rhodes; Denis McDonough, a deputy national security adviser; and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to the Oval Office.
The president will talk off the cuff for a half-hour or so about what he wants to say in the speech. Rhodes calls it the “download.”
Obama will go back to the speech, almost always by hand, three or four times before he’s satisfied.
“His criticism is more, ‘No, what I really wanted to say is this, and you didn’t quite capture that here,’” Rhodes said. “Generally, if he’s not happy with it, he knows why he’s not, so he gives you a pretty clear sense the first time he talks to you.”
The one thing that gets Obama annoyed, Rhodes said, is “wishy-washy language.”
…After nearly two years that involved uploading the audio of Obama’s every campaign event onto his computer, listening to recordings and poring over transcripts of interviews to get a sense of how he speaks offhand, Rhodes knows the president’s voice. He continues to study him, weaving ad lib answers Obama gives in news conferences into his later remarks.
I’m reminded of how Ted Sorensen, JFK’s chief speechwriter, spent months reading every address by Winston Churchill to learn his rhetorical style. Great writers read and study and listen to the greats gone before.
But it would be intimidating to walk into the Oval Office when everyone “lives with the reality that the president is the best speechwriter in the group.” Talk about pressure.
