Former Obama speech writer says authenticity is key
Sarada Peri leading two workshops at Ryerson to teach students about breakthrough messaging
Barack Obama’s former speech writers met up last week for lunch in D.C. and asked each other: had anyone filled their roles at the White House?
U.S. President Donald Trump certainly makes some formal remarks and ceremonial speeches, but many of his public comments seem off-the-cuff.
“What we’ve decided is there are speech writers, based on public records,” former senior speech writer Sarada Peri told the Star on Monday evening, sitting on a couch at Toronto’s Chelsea Hotel.
“I would also encourage them to quit, but I don’t know who they are.”
Peri, 37, is in Canada as a visiting global fellow for the Ryerson Leadership Lab.
She’s spent the week leading two workshops on breakthrough messaging — and when discussing political communication, the current administration under Trump comes up.
“Objectively, we understand that Trump does not say things that are truthful. And just today, the press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was up there just saying lie after lie. And I just feel like no job is worth that,” she said.
In her years in the Obama era, working on the team of speech writers led by Cody Keenan, she said that their fact-checking process was rigorous “to the point of sometimes being annoying.”
But when they cleared out of the White House last winter, she said, there was no transition between their team and the incoming speech writers.
“I have certainly not had any contact with them,” she said, adding that if Trump’s team had a communication strategy, she certainly didn’t know it.
“It never feels real. It’s clearly something that’s packaged and contained by his staff, and he’s just like the Incredible Hulk waiting to pull off the shackles that have been imposed on him,” she said.
Taking a break from D.C. and working with students in Canada was refreshing for her, she said. One of the points she tried to impart on the students she was working with was that you shouldn’t alter your key message or idea to appeal to a given audience. Instead, she said, you should try to find the right words.
“Where that comes from is trying to figure out what drives your audience,” she said.
“What is their interest? Where are they coming from? And what values do they hold?” she asked. “And can you do that in a way that speaks to their values and their experiences as opposed to your own?”
She looks to works from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address to speeches by Winston Churchill for inspiration. One familiar work from her college days — Virginia Woolf’s ARoom of One’s Own— offered comfort and reinvigoration on difficult days. And Peri has seen many of them.
Her career started in New Orleans, as a high school English teacher with Teach for America. There, she says, she became so angry at the state of the education system in the U.S. that she decided to go into education policy. After years as a policy staffer on Capitol Hill, she fell into speech writing. And 41⁄ years later, Keenan
2 called. Did she want to write speeches for the president?
“And I said, are you . . . kidding me?” she laughed.
Looking back, she said she’d already lived the first line of her obituary.
While social media and media outlets are changing rapidly, she said it was useful to lean on strategies that have always proven effective.
“The tried and true messaging tenets from Aristotle’s time still stand,” she said.
“That you need to be authentic and be honest. That your message has to be the one thing that you believe, that you can credibly say.
“Storytelling is really important — and maybe more important than ever.”