Forty-seven years ago, a young speechwriter took a seat high in the stands to hear a newly elected president deliver an address the writer had helped create.
Ted Sorensen wore a heavy coat, scarf and gloves over his suit and carried a top hat for the occasion. Some in the huge Washington crowd looked expectant, he recalls, others skeptical about the nation’s youngest and first Catholic president.
On that winter day, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most memorable speeches of the 20th century. “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” he said. “My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
For Sorensen, watching that speech was the thrill of a lifetime. But who actually wrote those words? His response: “Ask not.”
He and other speechwriters minimize their roles as craftsmen who put words in the mouths of candidates and presidents. Mere agents, they call themselves, who study candidates’ speech patterns, ideas and policies to help them better express themselves.
Yet they revel in the emergence of speechmaking as a focus of the 2008 presidential campaign. In the age of text messaging, old-fashioned oratory is capturing the imagination of young voters once regarded as indifferent to politics.
Much of this comes from the campaign of Barack Obama, a candidate Democrats and Republicans alike call a gifted speaker. But while his supporters see an inspiring leader who has generated remarkable excitement about a presidential campaign, his critics see a candidate at his best before a teleprompter, long on rhetoric, short on substance.
The three remaining candidates bring three distinct styles to the stump, speechwriters and political analysts say.
Obama is the orator, using rhythm, repetition and powerful imagery to inspire audiences with a message of hope: “Generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can,” he said in New Hampshire.
“It was a creed written into founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can …”
Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasizes her expertise in speeches that dwell on policy proposals, sprinkling them with anecdotes about people who have suffered from government indifference.
“Not as inspiring, but much more concrete, much more detailed,” said Elizabeth Skewes, an assistant professor specializing in media and politics at the University of Colorado.
At Obama rallies, she says, “I almost expect them to hold up Bic lighters.”
John McCain doesn’t pretend to be an orator.
“He’s really a very plain-spoken candidate. He doesn’t go in for the flourishes,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “You hand him the scripted speeches, and it doesn’t sound like McCain.”
This week, Obama turned again to oratory to rescue his campaign from a crisis about words — anti-American words from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor in Chicago.
New mantra: “Not this time”
In a speech he spent days crafting with the help of his lead speechwriter, Obama urged Americans to move beyond “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” It came with a new mantra: “Not this time.”
“This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children,” he said. “This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life.”
Speeches are just one part of a candidate’s appeal. But campaign analysts say Obama’s exceptional speaking talent undoubtedly helped propel him into the Democratic lead, just as Fred Thompson’s stumbling performances quickly ended a heralded Republican candidacy.
Sorensen, a legendary speechwriter who helped write Kennedy’s remarks to the nation during the Cuban missile crisis and his 1963 civil- rights speech, has endorsed Obama and campaigned for him.
He sees Obama as the greatest speaker to come down the campaign trail since Kennedy and his brother Robert.
“In many ways, he faces similar obstacles to his candidacy,” Sorensen said. “He has a similar appeal to the young and the young at heart. His speeches have a style as well as substance, much like Kennedy’s.”
The other contenders? “Pardon me while I yawn,” he said.
Elegance vs. plain speaking
James Humes, a speechwriter for five Republican presidents, doesn’t see substance in Obama’s oratory.
“Obama is a superb speaker,” he said at a conservative leadership conference in Colorado Springs. “But I think it’s like the cotton candy I had at the county fair. It’s sweet, it looks good — and it’s all air.”
McCain “is not a gifted speaker. He takes pride in not being one. But he’s a plain speaker. That might work for him,” Humes said. Against Obama or Clinton, “I think McCain is at least a 50-50 shot to win.”
In this campaign, Obama has relied on a team of young speechwriters led by Jon Favreau, 26, who previously worked for Sen. John Kerry; and Adam Frankel, who has worked with Sorensen.
Clinton’s chief speechwriter, Sarah Hurwitz, wrote speeches for the 2004 campaign of Gen. Wesley Clark. McCain relies on Mark Salter, a close adviser who also helped write his books.
While presidents since George Washington have turned to trusted advisers for help with speeches, the role of the presidential speechwriter has grown enormously in the past century.
The taciturn Calvin Coolidge was the first president to hire a full-time speechwriter. Now, each president has teams of them.
Sorensen had a hand in each of Kennedy’s greatest speeches. Peggy Noonan, now a contributing columnist to the Wall Street Journal, wrote some of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable words.
The art of invisibility
In a campaign, speechwriters ideally are invisible participants. The Obama, Clinton and McCain campaigns all turned down requests to interview their chief speechwriters.
“You’re doing your job when it sounds like there’s not a job for you to do, when it sounds like the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth are actually the candidate’s words and no others’,” said Joseph Tuman, former speechwriter and author of a new book, “Political Communication in American Campaigns.”
Sorensen insists that, at least in his case, he was not the author of Kennedy’s speeches.
“What’s not important is the wordsmithing,” he said. “What is important is the decisions that the speech conveys, the principles, the values. If I helped on the words, yes I did, but that doesn’t make me the author.”
David Olinger: 303-954-1498 or dolinger@denverpost.com
