The Speechwriter Read Online Free PDF

someone from the policy office would ask. “Yeah, we’ve got language on that.” Every week, sometimes every day, some new dispute would have all the attention—tax incentives for corporate retailers, a lawsuit against the Department of Social Services, a bill forcing businesses to verify the immigration status of all their employees—and language was needed for each one. Sometimes you got the feeling that all these fights over policies didn’t amount to much more than a lot of words. It was Foucault who held that political power structures were really just a matter of “competing discourses.” There’s something to that idea, only in my experience nobody controlled anything, and certainly not discourse. Nobody ever won. It felt like a long pitched battle in which there were no victors and only occasional casualties.
    Once, when the governor had angered the public education establishment over a funding issue, the office received a barrage of calls chastising him for his “arrogance.” Almost all the callers, we began to notice, used that word. Then we realized that most of them were just reading a statement given to them by some advocacy group. I was sitting next to June, the deputy chief of staff, when she took one of these calls. She had heard the statement recited many times already and knew it ended with the words “Please tell the governor to stop his political posturing. We, the voters, are watching.” Evidently this caller had stumbled over the phrase “political posturing” and lost her place in the script. So June helpfully added, “You, the voters, are watching?”
    â€œYes,” the caller said.
    â€œThank you, ma’am,” June answered, chewing gum and playing Brick Breaker on her computer. “I’ll pass along your message to the governor.”
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    Our first task was mastering the language we already had; the second, for me, was developing the capacity to produce it anew. This wasn’t going well. I took great pains with my compositions; I groped for just the right word, rearranged sentences to make them strike the ear in just the right way. That’s the difficult thing about writing well: you labor for a long time over a single paragraph, as I have this one, and in the end, if you’re successful, it looks as if it took no work at all. I anticipated that the governor would sense the differencebetween what I produced and what my colleagues and predecessors produced.
    I did not feel superior to them in other respects. They were far more intelligent and capable than I was and worked faster. They understood the import of complicated policy decisions. They could speak credibly about the differences between competing bills on income tax reduction and the principles underlying each one. They seemed to have a natural and instantaneous grasp of things like labor force growth and global GDP. Yet when they tried to put their understanding into written form, they sounded like morons. Nat was a partial exception here, but even he seemed to think that writing was good only if it sounded grandiose, which to him meant using blistering sarcasm, cute analogies, and of course alliteration.
    The governor would ask for an op-ed on some topic and say he wanted it the next morning. Ordinarily you’d have to know a lot about labor force growth to write an op-ed on it, but I didn’t. The policy shop would provide the relevant facts and analysis; my job was to shape those into eight hundred words of readable English. I would spend most of the night rewording phrases for maximum effect, perfecting transitions, scouring my mind for just the right metaphors, making the discussion of policy sound authoritative but not wonkish, and giving the last paragraph that sting that makes an op-ed memorable.
    And he’d hate it. Once, the door of the press office flew open and the governor, paper in hand, started to explain to me why what I had