Shaping a Speech, 50 Years After ‘I Have a Dream’
Shaping a Speech, 50 Years After ‘I Have a Dream’
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: August 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — Talk about pressure.
Next week, President Obama will mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington with a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, willingly putting himself in the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of America’s greatest oratories five decades ago.
The split-screen comparisons are as inevitable as they are unwanted. A gifted orator himself, Mr. Obama nonetheless faces an unenviable task: to offer Americans a stirring, resonant moment that goes beyond his sometimes professorial remarks, without falling into a politically dangerous mimicry of Dr. King’s cadences and rhythms.
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“You don’t try to outdo the speech that was there,” said Jon Favreau, the president’s former top speechwriter, who left the White House this year. “You want the speech to say something new, to add to whatever was said before. Why is it relevant today? What can we learn from it in our time?”
Mr. Obama’s mere presence on the Lincoln Memorial platform on Wednesday will speak volumes: the election of the nation’s first black president serves as a testament to America’s sometimes halting progress toward what Dr. King that day envisioned as an “invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/politics/shaping-a-speech-50-years-after-i-have-a-dream.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=1&