The voice of Michelle Obama
When Sarah Hurwitz sits down at her laptop, she puts on her noise-blocking headphones and imagines Michelle Obama’s exacting voice in her head.
The voice might say: No, that transition is clumsy. Or: Are we really telling this story in a way that honours these people?
Hurwitz, the first lady’s head speech writer, has written for the Obamas for eight years and for Michelle Obama exclusively for nearly seven. The two have worked so closely together that nearly every word the first lady has spoken in public has been written or edited by Hurwitz.
“As I write for her now, I’m sort of editing the speech with her voice in my head because she’s given me so much feedback over the years and been so clear about what she wants,” Hurwitz said.
The 38-year-old Harvard Law School grad is an Obama original, one of the few remaining staff members who joined the White House straight from the 2008 campaign. She started that cycle, though, as Hillary Clinton’s chief speech writer. Two days after Clinton conceded defeat with a memorable speech hailing “18 million cracks” in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” the Obama team called to offer Hurwitz ajob. She was first assigned to write for the candidate’s wife when Obama was preparing to reintroduce herself to the world at the Denver convention.
“She clearly said to me: ‘Okay, this is who I am. This is where I come from. This is my family. These are my values, and this is what I want to talk about at the convention,’ ” Hurwitz recalled. “I realized then that Michelle Obama knows who she is, and she always knows what she wants to say.”
After trading a couple of drafts back and forth — Hurwitz writing, and rewriting, based on Obama’s edits — they settled on a final version that told the story of Michelle Obama as a child of Chicago’s working-class South Side, a woman who had long been skeptical of politics but who believed in her husband’s ability to make a difference. Hailed as a high point of the convention, it sent Obama’s popularity soaring.
The hours are long; there always seems to be some important event looming. Hurwitz has made efforts to focus on her personal life by taking classes on Judaism and exercising regularly.
Hurwitz was with her boss in New Mexico recently, where she got to see how one of Obama’s final commencement speeches resonated with its audience at the Santa Fe Indian School. It drew a sharp connection between her enslaved ancestors and the painful early history of the 126-year-old school.
“This school was founded as part of a deliberate, systematic effort to extinguish your culture; to literally annihilate who you were and what you believed in. But look at you today,” the first lady said to applause. “The native languages that were once strictly forbidden here now echo through hallways and in your dorm-room conversations at night.”
Hurwitz said she got lost in the moment, even though she had helped to craft the words.
“I thought to myself, ‘I am watching the great-greatgranddaughter of a slave give a speech to a room of native American kids, (and) the vast majority of them are going to college, and many to Ivy League schools,’ ” Hurwitz said. “To see that — this is a great country.”