#speech-writing

Mitt Romney

This is a real quote.

the author in barack obama never really left the room.

In the years since his ’04 Democratic-convention keynote speech opened Obama’s biography to mass consumption, we’ve picked through nearly every theme—the biraciality, the absent father, the community organizing, the deft navigation of the political minefield that is Chicago—as a way of explaining What Makes Obama Obama.

Yet the president’s writing life has gotten surprisingly little notice. His talent with words is widely acknowledged, but that skill is often regarded as more instrumental than essential, a kind of handy tool for a politician, like George W. Bush’s facility for remembering names or Bill Clinton’s talent for spewing out worldly minutiae. But what if the knack is more like a calling?

At least from early adulthood if not before, Barack Obama was clearly driven to write; to trace that continuing compulsion, from the days when he penned fiction and then memoir to his present speechcraft, is to recognize that writing is anything but a small part of Obama’s life. It’s basic to who he is.

“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’