Wow - Jon Favreau is the man
Tonight, for the seventh long year, the American people heard a State of the Union that didn’t reflect the America we see, and didn’t address the challenges we face.
That was the opening sentence of Obama’s response to the state of the union speech. It’s fucking brilliant. And one assumes that it’s another example of the work of an amazing team led by a 26-year old speechwriter named Jon Favreau.
This is the same force behind the immortal opening sentence of Obama’s speech following the Iowa caucuses: “They said this day would never come.”
Or, from the equally impressive “yes, we can” speech following South Carolina:
After four great contests, in every corner of this country, we have the most votes, the most delegates, and the most diverse coalition of Americans that we’ve seen in a long, long time.
And the speech that originally tipped me over into the Obama camp (read on the tiny screen of a cell phone, no less), invoking “what what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’”
It’s really really really hard to write like this - the precise conjuring of the right word, the varying cadence and emphasis, the careful repetitions - I could go on for hours talking about how technically excellent these speeches are.
This dude is definitely on my “people I want to meet someday” list.
I have this idealistic, optimistic belief that with more people able to hear directly from the candidates via YouTube and other direct Internet channels, that the power of this quality of speechwriting is going to become as important as ever. (That video of the speech at Ebenezer Baptist has now cleared half a million views on YouTube: 561,344 as of this writing.)
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