Reply #100: What????

[stillcool]

Audacity of hope ... It does have a nice ring. Does Edwards have the trademark on it to prove Obama is ripping him off?

Not if you ask the Obama camp, which had no formal response to Mrs. Edwards's comment but pointed out Obama's history with the phrase.

The junior senator from Illinois referenced "audacity of hope" in his 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father." The line, they said, was taken from a sermon preached by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright titled "The Audacity to Hope."

Furthermore, as recounted in a Christian Science Monitor article last month, "Wright impressed Obama, and by 1988 the younger man found himself in the pews, listening to parishioners clap and cry out as Wright spoke of 'the audacity of hope."

As the Chicago Tribune wrote in January, Obama based his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention on Wright's "Audacity to Hope" sermon.

In His Candidate’s Voice

The speech lit a fire. Meet Obama's editor.
By Richard Wolffe
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 7:22 PM ET Jan 6, 2008

Jon Favreau has the worst and the best job in political speechwriting. His boss is a best-selling author who doesn't really need his help, having written the 2004 speech that catapulted him onto the national stage. At the same time, the same boss also happens to be capable of delivering a speech in ways that can give his audience the goosebumps.
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"What is your theory of speechwriting?" Obama asked.

"I have no theory," admitted Favreau. "But when I saw you at the convention, you basically told a story about your life from beginning to end, and it was a story that fit with the larger American narrative. People applauded not because you wrote an applause line but because you touched something in the party and the country that people had not touched before. Democrats haven't had that in a long time."

The pitch worked. Favreau and Obama rapidly found a relatively direct way to work with each other. "What I do is to sit with him for half an hour," Favreau explains. "He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That's how we get a
finished product.

"It's a great way to write speeches. A lot of times, you write something, you hand it in, it gets hacked by advisers, it gets to the candidate and then it gets sent back to you. This is a much more intimate way to work."

Some speeches are much more the product of the candidate himself. Obama e-mailed Favreau his draft of his announcement speech in Springfield, Ill., at 4 a.m. on the morning of the campaign launch last February.

Now Favreau has his own team: Adam Frankel, a 26-year-old who worked with Ted Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, a 30-year-old who worked with Lee Hamilton on the 9/11 commission's report.

Together they had just three weeks to work on Obama's game-changing speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa and even less time to work on Obama's victory speech last week. Weaving together lines from previous speeches—and even Obama's books—the team now knows the themes and language that reflect the candidate's voice.

"Even if we had finished third, we would go on to New Hampshire," says Favreau of the victory speech plan. "I had a winning and a keep-fighting speech, but in the end they weren't that different. The message out of Iowa was one of unity and reaching out across party lines. We knew we were going to do well with independents, young people and first-time voters. We knew the message was similar to what he said at the 2004 convention."

The result was a speech with a light touch on the most striking point about Obama's victory: the historic nature of a black candidate's win in the almost entirely white state of Iowa. "The first line was simply, 'They said this day would never come'," says Favreau. "Even when we do speeches to African-American crowds, it's hinted at and it's understood. It's not hammered over the head."

So how hard is it to write for someone who has written his own books and speeches to critical acclaim? "People say that, but it's actually a dream come true," says Favreau. "You always hope that the person can match the lofty moment that the writer dreams up. To have someone who can do that makes it a joy to work with him."

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/84756