Salon: Obama needs to find the guy who made all things seem possible in 2008...within himself

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Sunday, Aug 22, 2010 23:23 ET
Can the president get us out of this mess?
Obama needs to find the guy who wrote stirring speeches and made all things seem possible in 2008 -- within himself

By Dan Conley

As a professional speechwriter, I have a deep affection for the mad Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a man whose unorthodoxy is so deeply ingrained that he has ghost-written negative reviews of his own books. He’s also a speechwriter – a profession that saved him from hopeless unemployment.

As a young man, Zizek couldn’t attain a teaching job in his native Slovenia because his college papers diverged too broadly from approved Marxist dogma. But shortly thereafter, he joined the Communist party to land a government speechwriting job.

As Zizek might say, isn’t that's the essence of the profession? Doesn’t one truly become a speechwriter the day he or she sacrifices every principle to ventriloquize for the powerful, to create facile rhetoric for those most hostile to your own thoughts?

President Obama, famously, writes his own speeches. Or he talks through ideas with his “special assistant” Jon Favreau long enough so that Favreau can read Obama’s mind on the subject at hand. This is the official White House line on the words that appear on the President’s teleprompter, and who are we to doubt it? “Dreams of My Father” remains the single greatest contribution Barack Obama has made to American culture. A close second place is his speech in Philadelphia on the heels of the Rev. Wright controversy, followed by his speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention. Every word of those works of art is his, so we are told. So let’s assume that Obama, like Zizek, is a member of the fraternity, and that Mr. Favreau is merely a stenographer.

Channeling Zizek again, is it not possible – or even likely – that speechwriter Barack Obama feels a certain emotional and intellectual distance from, maybe even disdain for, President Barack Obama? At his core, the speechwriter Barack Obama is still the cunning idealist of “Dreams of My Father,” still the gifted intellectual focused doggedly on social change. It was speechwriter Obama who introduced issues like talking to foreign despots and the continued importance of race in our culture into the American public square, daring to upset orthodoxy.

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/08/22/obama_as_speechwriter