Entrancing Teamwork: Obama making the words his own

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Ask the average movie goer who their favourite actor is, and you’ll get an answer. You’ll probably get an answer if you ask for their favourite director, but if you ask for their favourite screen writer, you will in all likelihood, draw a blank.

I suspect that the same is true with great speech writers. Most modern politicians simply don’t have the time to craft their own speeches. Now don’t get me wrong, I found Obama’s Chicago victory oration as inspiring as the next man. His delivery was superb, but in the absence of the credits rolling, we should at least acknowledge the team of writers behind the performance. One of them, New Statesman writer and volunteer advisor Jacob Rigg, phoned, emailed and videoed his contribution from London. But who else was on the team? It’s hard to find out.

Pulitzer prize winning author Jane Smiley thought that he’d written it all himself, and rejoiced in the idea of having a wordsmith in the White House. Certainly there is no doubt the Obama has a gift for words; his undergraduate poetry even got approval from Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom.

Whether or not the president-elect relied on a team of writers is, from a purely presentational point of view, not as important as the fact that he made the words his own. This is proof, if any were needed, of what a masterful speaker he is. No writing, however good, can give you a feeling for the audience that is the skill of the orator.

From a measured start, Obama reached into the collective soul of that Chicago crowd until they spoke with one voice, “Yes we can, yes we can”! I choose the word soul deliberately, for here is a man with the cadences of a preacher and the presence of a prophet.

The template was from the best: Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, but for me it was the way he managed to personalise, through the experiences of Ann Nixon Cooper … the story of modern America … that was the pathway to the people’s hearts. It was a story of triumph over adversity, of good over evil, and it struck an almost fairy tale chord with the audience who listened with the innocence of children who wanted to believe.

Having got his audience relaxed by repeating in a new way a story they all knew, he began to weave, through six short paragraphs, each with its chanted coda, a thread of hypnotic hope. Even through a bullet proof glass barrier and the paraphernalia of television transmission, we felt the pulse and collective energy of that occasion. The audience was mesmerised. Thousands of miles away in Australia  we caught their mood and were likewise entranced.

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