Writer’s charge: Mirror thinking
More than mere mimicry, presidential speeches require absorbing leader’s worldview
WASHINGTON — Speechwriting, in one sense, is essentially being someone else’s mirror.
“You can try to find the right words,” said Dan Cluchey, a former speechwriter for President Joe Biden. “But ultimately, your job is to ensure that when the speech is done, that it has a reflection of the speaker.”
That concept is infinitely magnified in the role of the presidential speechwriter. Over the course of U.S. history, those aides have absorbed the personalities, the quirks, the speech cadences of the most powerful leader on the globe, capturing his thoughts for all manner of public remarks, from the mundane to the historic.
There are few times in a presidency the art — and the rigorous, often painful process — of speechwriting is more on display than during a State of the Union, when the vast array of a president’s policy aspirations and political messages come together in a carefully choreographed address at the Capitol. Biden will deliver the annual address Thursday.
It’s a process former White House speechwriters say take months, with untold lobbying and input from various federal agencies and others outside the president’s inner circle who are all working to ensure their favored proposals get a mention. Speechwriters have the unenviable task of taking dozens of ideas and stitching them into a cohesive narrative of a president’s vision for the year.
Amid all those formalities and constraints of a State of the Union address, there is also how a president executes the speech.
Biden’s biggest political liability remains his age — 81 — and voters’ questions about whether he is still up to the job. His every word is watched by Republican operatives eager to capture any misstatement to plant doubt about Biden’s fitness among the public.
“This year, of course, is an election year. It also comes as there’s much more chatter about his age,” said Michael Waldman, who served as a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. “People are really going to be scrutinizing him for how he delivers the speech, as much as what he says.”
Biden will remain at Camp David through Tuesday and is expected to spend much of that time preparing for the State of the Union.
The plain-spoken Biden is known to hate Washington jargon and the alphabet soup of government acronyms, and he has challenged aides, when writing his remarks, to cut through the clutter and to get to the point with speed. Cluchey, who worked for Biden from 2018 to 2022, said the president was very engaged in the speech-drafting process, all the way down to individual lines and words.
“This is not an act of impression, where you’re simply just trying to get the accent down,” said Jeff Shesol, another former Clinton speechwriter. “What you really are learning to do and need to learn to do — this is true of speechwriters in any role, but particularly for a president — is to understand not just how he sounds, but how he thinks.”
Shesol added: “You’re absorbing not just the rhythms and cadences of speech, but you’re absorbing a worldview.”