how to write a speech like obama

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How to Write a Great Speech, According to the Obamas’ Speechwriter

By Liam Freeman

It was the summer of 1998, the end of her junior year of college, when Sarah Hurwitz fell in love with the art form of writing the perfect speech, having scored an internship at the White House in Vice President Al Gore’s speechwriting office. “Every day, his staff used words to move, inspire, comfort, and empower people,” she recalls. “I still can’t imagine a better way to spend a career.”

And what an extraordinary career Hurwitz’s has been. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she became the chief speechwriter for Hillary Rodham Clinton on her 2008 presidential campaign. Eventually, she returned to the White House, serving as the head speechwriter for first lady Michelle Obama and as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017.

Here, Hurwitz shares 11 nuggets of speechwriting wisdom that she’s garnered along the way so that you can shine at your next public address, whether that be a televised political debate, a work presentation, or a toast at your best friend’s wedding.

1. Channel the person who is speaking

The true art of speechwriting isn’t scripting someone—it’s channeling their voice. My first step when writing a speech for Mrs. Obama would be to sit down with her and ask, “What would you like to say?” She knows who she is, and she always knows what she wants to say. She’s also a naturally gifted speaker and writer, so I’d transcribe as she talked, forming the basis of the first draft.

2. Research and understand your audience

Who are you talking to? What are they concerned about? Why are you speaking to them? How well do they know you? What’s the venue? If Mrs. Obama was speaking at a university, for example, it was important to understand the history and student body of that university. If you’re giving a toast at your best friend’s wedding, you need to know if you can tell a story that’s a bit edgy or if their family will get offended.

3. Know that structure is destiny

If you have a bad structure, you can’t have a good speech. Every paragraph should flow logically from one to the next. When I’m trying to figure out the structure of a speech, I’ll often print it out and cut it up with scissors so I can move parts around. It’s only then that I realize the order is wrong or I see that I’m repeating myself or I notice that certain passages could be combined.

4. Seek multiple opinions  

It’s really important to ask other people to look at your speech—as many as possible, especially if you’re speaking to a community that you don’t know well. You need to find someone from that audience who understands its cultural sensitivities and norms so you speak in a way that inspires people rather than causing offense.

5. Throw the rulebook out of the window

Writing to be read and writing to be heard are two very different skills. Spoken language doesn’t need to conform to grammar and punctuation norms. I often use ellipses instead of commas to indicate pauses because they’re easier to see. It’s fine to space things weirdly on the page or add notations if it helps you—all that matters is how the words sound coming out of your mouth.

With that in mind, you should edit out loud. Don’t just sit looking at your computer screen—print the speech out, practice delivering it, and edit as you go.

6. Listening is the key to great speaking

There were hundreds of occasions when Mrs. Obama gave me feedback that ultimately influenced how I write. My drafts would be covered in her handwritten edits: “Are the transitions seamless? Is the structure logical? Is this language the most vivid and moving that it can be?” And I would learn from those edits.

As I write, I hear her voice in my head saying things like, “This part is getting bogged down in the weeds,“ “we’re missing the beating heart,” “we’re missing the real human side of this issue.” Hone your ability to identify the weakest parts that aren’t working.

7. Speak like you usually do

It’s fine to ask yourself, “What will make me sound smart or powerful or funny?’”or “What does the audience want to hear?” But your first question should really be, “What is the deepest, most important truth that I can tell at this particular moment?” All too often people focus on how they’re going to say something rather than on what they’re actually going to say.

By Kathleen Baird-Murray

By Christian Allaire

By Kate Lloyd

Then, when they give a speech, they often take on an overly formal and stiff giving-a-speech voice or they slip into their professional jargon and use words that no one understands. If something feels unnatural or awkward when you say it, go back and rewrite it until it sounds like you.

8. Show, don’t tell

This may sound like a basic writing tip, but it’s rare that people execute this well. If you’re bored during a speech, it’s probably because the person is telling not showing. Mrs. Obama didn’t start her 2016 Democratic National Convention speech by saying: “On my daughter’s first day of school at the White House, I was nervous, afraid, and anxious.” She said: “I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just 7 and 10 years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those big men with guns. And I saw their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, What have we done?” It’s such a searing image. Anytime you find yourself using a lot of adjectives, stop, step back, and think about painting a picture for people instead.

9. Don’t let technology get in the way

We’re living in the age of Zoom, and many people are delivering speeches virtually, which creates a whole new set of challenges. The audience often has their cameras turned off, or even if they’re on, there’s a disconnect. For this reason, I’d advise against a lecture-style format on Zoom. Instead, opt for interview style—give your host a set of questions to ask you so you can convey your message. This back-and-forth is more engaging via video calls.

10. Watch the clock

People are distracted today and have limited bandwidth to listen to what you are saying, so it’s really important to focus your message. Do you want them to feel reassured, courageous, fired up? Whatever the emotion, really think about that as you’re writing your speech. As for the length, it depends on your venue. If you’re doing a toast at your best friend’s wedding, keep it to five minutes (it’s not your wedding!), and for a keynote speech, no longer than 20 minutes.

11. Consider the format

Unless you have an incredible memory, don’t put yourself under added pressure by trying to learn your speech by heart. That said, what you read from matters. Some speakers are most comfortable with their speech when it’s written out verbatim. For others, reading a speech word for word feels awkward. Try experimenting with different formats, such as bullet points or cue cards. If you’re printing your remarks out on paper, keep the text on the top two-thirds of the page—otherwise, as you get to the bottom of the page, you’ll have to bend your neck to look down, and you’ll end up swallowing your words and breaking eye contact with your audience.  *Sarah Hurwitz ’s debut book, Here All Along (Penguin Random House), is out now.

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To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories

How to give a speech like Barack Obama

By Charlie Burton

1. Begin conversationally

Example: "You know, they said this day would never come." Obama, opening to the Iowa caucuses victory speech, 2008 Favreau: "I tell the president to start speeches in the most organic way possible. You wouldn't start a conversation by saying 'As John F. Kennedy once said...', so you shouldn't start a speech that way either. When he won the Iowa caucuses a lot of people said he should start with a bunch of acknowledgements. I said no, the whole world's going to be watching so he needs a big opening, but it can't be too cheesy. What we came up with was a natural thing to say, but also has a lot of meaning."

2. Tell riskier jokes

Example: "Just the other day, Matt Damon - I love Matt Damon, love the guy - Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well Matt, I just saw the Adjustment Bureau , so right back at you, buddy." Obama, White House Correspondents' Dinner speech, 2011 Favreau: "It's good to put in jokes that are really funny but not 'appropriate' for a politician to tell. Before the Correspondents' Dinner I'd sit and look at a list of all the jokes we have. We don't try to force a knock-knock humour on the president - he is funniest when he makes wry observations about the absurdity of politics."

3. Get personal

Example: "Being a teenager isn't easy. It's a time when you're wrestling with a lot of things. When I was in my teens, I was wrestling with all sorts of questions about who I was. I had a white mother and a black father, and my father wasn't around; he had left when I was two." Obama, back-to-school speech, 2010 Favreau: "Personal stories date back as far as Reagan and Clinton. The ones that work tell people why you do the things you do. If you're telling a personal story make it authentic - talk about tough times. I've seen some Cameron speeches and I haven't noticed any personal biography - nor Brown, nor Blair - and it's interesting I haven't."

4. Fight with humour

Example: "You [Mitt Romney] might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally." Obama, Democratic National Convention speech, 2012 Favreau: "What might seem like a good needling of the opposition on paper sounds a bit harsher in reality and you won't get the applause. So a little goes a long way - the press will always pick up on it when you try to 'draw a contrast' as we call it. Humour is a great approach. Or look at what we did when we ran against Hillary [Clinton] in the primary: the president rarely used Hillary's name but everyone knew he was talking about her."

5. More drama!

Example: "I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return." Obama, Democratic National Convention speech, 2012 Favreau: "These lines were going to be at the top of the speech, but we moved them to the end because it was worth having a dramatic moment before speeding up and getting people going again. To do that - to get the best applause - say things like, 'Make your voice heard', 'Are you with me'. That's how Bobby Kennedy would end his speeches."

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2013 edition of British GQ.

Obama's full final speech video and transcript

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This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

OBAMA: Hello Chicago!

It’s good to be home!

Thank you, everybody!

Thank you so much, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

It’s good to be home.

We’re on live TV here, I’ve got to move.

You can tell that I’m a lame duck, because nobody is following instructions.

Everybody have a seat.

My fellow Americans, Michelle and I have been so touched by all the well-wishes that we’ve received over the past few weeks. But tonight it’s my turn to say thanks.

Whether we have seen eye-to-eye or rarely agreed at all, my conversations with you, the American people — in living rooms and in schools; at farms and on factory floors; at diners and on distant military outposts — those conversations are what have kept me honest, and kept me inspired, and kept me going. And every day, I have learned from you. You made me a better president, and you made me a better man.

So I first came to Chicago when I was in my early twenties, and I was still trying to figure out who I was; still searching for a purpose to my life. And it was a neighborhood not far from here where I began working with church groups in the shadows of closed steel mills.

It was on these streets where I witnessed the power of faith, and the quiet dignity of working people in the face of struggle and loss.

(CROWD CHANTING “FOUR MORE YEARS”)

I can’t do that.

Now this is where I learned that change only happens when ordinary people get involved, and they get engaged, and they come together to demand it.

After eight years as your president, I still believe that. And it’s not just my belief. It’s the beating heart of our American idea — our bold experiment in self-government.

It’s the conviction that we are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It’s the insistence that these rights, while self-evident, have never been self-executing; that We, the People, through the instrument of our democracy, can form a more perfect union.

What a radical idea, the great gift that our Founders gave to us. The freedom to chase our individual dreams through our sweat, and toil, and imagination — and the imperative to strive together as well, to achieve a common good, a greater good.

For 240 years, our nation’s call to citizenship has given work and purpose to each new generation. It’s what led patriots to choose republic over tyranny, pioneers to trek west, slaves to brave that makeshift railroad to freedom.

It’s what pulled immigrants and refugees across oceans and the Rio Grande. It’s what pushed women to reach for the ballot. It’s what powered workers to organize. It’s why GIs gave their lives at Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima; Iraq and Afghanistan — and why men and women from Selma to Stonewall were prepared to give theirs as well.

By Daniel Riley

By Conrad Quilty-Harper

By Zak Maoui

So that’s what we mean when we say America is exceptional. Not that our nation has been flawless from the start, but that we have shown the capacity to change, and make life better for those who follow.

Yes, our progress has been uneven. The work of democracy has always been hard. It has been contentious. Sometimes it has been bloody. For every two steps forward, it often feels we take one step back. But the long sweep of America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some.

If I had told you eight years ago that America would reverse a great recession, reboot our auto industry, and unleash the longest stretch of job creation in our history — if I had told you that we would open up a new chapter with the Cuban people, shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without firing a shot, take out the mastermind of 9-11 — if I had told you that we would win marriage equality and secure the right to health insurance for another 20 million of our fellow citizens — if I had told you all that, you might have said our sights were set a little too high.

But that’s what we did. That’s what you did. You were the change. The answer to people’s hopes and, because of you, by almost every measure, America is a better, stronger place than it was when we started.

In 10 days the world will witness a hallmark of our democracy. No, no, no, no, no. The peaceful transfer of power from one freely-elected President to the next. I committed to President-Elect Trump that my administration would ensure the smoothest possible transition, just as President Bush did for me.

Because it’s up to all of us to make sure our government can help us meet the many challenges we still face. We have what we need to do so. We have everything we need to meet those challenges. After all, we remain the wealthiest, most powerful, and most respected nation on earth.

Our youth, our drive, our diversity and openness, our boundless capacity for risk and reinvention means that the future should be ours. But that potential will only be realized if our democracy works. Only if our politics better reflects the decency of our people. Only if all of us, regardless of party affiliation or particular interests help restore the sense of common purpose that we so badly need right now.

And that’s what I want to focus on tonight, the state of our democracy. Understand democracy does not require uniformity. Our founders argued, they quarreled, and eventually they compromised. They expected us to do the same. But they knew that democracy does require a basic sense of solidarity. The idea that, for all our outward differences, we’re all in this together, that we rise or fall as one.

There have been moments throughout our history that threatened that solidarity. And the beginning of this century has been one of those times. A shrinking world, growing inequality, demographic change, and the specter of terrorism. These forces haven’t just tested our security and our prosperity, but are testing our democracy as well. And how we meet these challenges to our democracy will determine our ability to educate our kids and create good jobs and protect our homeland.

In other words, it will determine our future. To begin with, our democracy won’t work without a sense that everyone has economic opportunity.

And the good news is that today the economy is growing again. Wages, incomes, home values and retirement accounts are all rising again. Poverty is falling again.

The wealthy are paying a fair share of taxes. Even as the stock market shatters records, the unemployment rate is near a 10-year low. The uninsured rate has never, ever been lower.

Health care costs are rising at the slowest rate in 50 years. And I’ve said, and I mean it, anyone can put together a plan that is demonstrably better than the improvements we’ve made to our health care system, that covers as many people at less cost, I will publicly support it.

Because that, after all, is why we serve. Not to score points or take credit. But to make people’s lives better.

But, for all the real progress that we’ve made, we know it’s not enough. Our economy doesn’t work as well or grow as fast when a few prosper at the expense of a growing middle class, and ladders for folks who want to get into the middle class.

That’s the economic argument. But stark inequality is also corrosive to our democratic idea. While the top 1 percent has amassed a bigger share of wealth and income, too many of our families in inner cities and in rural counties have been left behind.

The laid off factory worker, the waitress or health care worker who’s just barely getting by and struggling to pay the bills. Convinced that the game is fixed against them. That their government only serves the interest of the powerful. That’s a recipe for more cynicism and polarization in our politics.

Now there’re no quick fixes to this long-term trend. I agree, our trade should be fair and not just free. But the next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good middle class jobs obsolete.

And so we’re going to have to forge a new social compact to guarantee all our kids the education they need.

To give workers the power...

... to unionize for better wages.

To update the social safety net to reflect the way we live now.

And make more reforms to the tax code so corporations and the individuals who reap the most from this new economy don’t avoid their obligations to the country that’s made their very success possible.

We can argue about how to best achieve these goals. But we can’t be complacent about the goals themselves. For if we don’t create opportunity for all people, the disaffection and division that has stalled our progress will only sharpen in years to come.

There’s a second threat to our democracy. And this one is as old as our nation itself.

After my election there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent...

... and often divisive force in our society.

Now I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, no matter what some folks say.

You can see it not just in statistics. You see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we’re not where we need to be. And all of us have more work to do.

If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.

If we’re unwilling to invest in the children of immigrants, just because they don’t look like us, we will diminish the prospects of our own children — because those brown kids will represent a larger and larger share of America’s workforce.

And we have shown that our economy doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Last year, incomes rose for all races, all age groups, for men and for women.

So if we’re going to be serious about race going forward, we need to uphold laws against discrimination — in hiring, and in housing, and in education, and in the criminal justice system.

That is what our Constitution and highest ideals require.

But laws alone won’t be enough. Hearts must change. It won’t change overnight. Social attitudes oftentimes take generations to change. But if our democracy is to work the way it should in this increasingly diverse nation, then each one of us need to try to heed the advice of a great character in American fiction, Atticus Finch, who said “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

For blacks and other minority groups, that means tying our own very real struggles for justice to the challenges that a lot of people in this country face. Not only the refugee or the immigrant or the rural poor or the transgender American, but also the middle-aged white guy who from the outside may seem like he’s got all the advantages, but has seen his world upended by economic, and cultural, and technological change.

We have to pay attention and listen.

For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ’60s; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness; when they wage peaceful protest, they’re not demanding special treatment, but the equal treatment that our founders promised.

For native-born Americans, it means reminding ourselves that the stereotypes about immigrants today were said, almost word for word, about the Irish, and Italians, and Poles, who it was said were going to destroy the fundamental character of America. And as it turned out, America wasn’t weakened by the presence of these newcomers; these newcomers embraced this nation’s creed, and this nation was strengthened.

So regardless of the station we occupy; we all have to try harder; we all have to start with the premise that each of our fellow citizens loves this country just as much as we do; that they value hard work and family just like we do; that their children are just as curious and hopeful and worthy of love as our own.

And that’s not easy to do. For too many of us it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions. In the rise of naked partisanship and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste, all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable.

And increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

And this trend represents a third threat to our democracy. Look, politics is a battle of ideas. That’s how our democracy was designed. In the course of a healthy debate, we prioritize different goals, and the different means of reaching them. But without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, then we’re going to keep talking past each other.

(CROWD CHEERS)

And we’ll make common ground and compromise impossible. And isn’t that part of what so often makes politics dispiriting? How can elected officials rage about deficits when we propose to spend money on pre-school for kids, but not when we’re cutting taxes for corporations?

How do we excuse ethical lapses in our own party, but pounce when the other party does the same thing? It’s not just dishonest, it’s selective sorting of the facts. It’s self-defeating because, as my mom used to tell me, reality has a way of catching up with you.

Take the challenge of climate change. In just eight years we’ve halved our dependence on foreign oil, we’ve doubled our renewable energy, we’ve led the world to an agreement that (at) the promise to save this planet.

But without bolder action, our children won’t have time to debate the existence of climate change. They’ll be busy dealing with its effects. More environmental disasters, more economic disruptions, waves of climate refugees seeking sanctuary. Now we can and should argue about the best approach to solve the problem. But to simply deny the problem not only betrays future generations, it betrays the essential spirit of this country, the essential spirit of innovation and practical problem-solving that guided our founders.

It is that spirit — it is that spirit born of the enlightenment that made us an economic powerhouse. The spirit that took flight at Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral, the spirit that cures disease and put a computer in every pocket, it’s that spirit. A faith in reason and enterprise, and the primacy of right over might, that allowed us to resist the lure of fascism and tyranny during the Great Depression, that allowed us to build a post-World War II order with other democracies.

An order based not just on military power or national affiliations, but built on principles, the rule of law, human rights, freedom of religion and speech and assembly and an independent press.

That order is now being challenged. First by violent fanatics who claim to speak for Islam. More recently by autocrats in foreign capitals who seek free markets in open democracies and civil society itself as a threat to their power.

The peril each poses to our democracy is more far reaching than a car bomb or a missile. They represent the fear of change. The fear of people who look or speak or pray differently. A contempt for the rule of law that holds leaders accountable. An intolerance of dissent and free thought. A belief that the sword or the gun or the bomb or the propaganda machine is the ultimate arbiter of what’s true and what’s right.

Because of the extraordinary courage of our men and women in uniform. Because of our intelligence officers and law enforcement and diplomats who support our troops...

... no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years.

And although...

... Boston and Orlando and San Bernardino and Fort Hood remind us of how dangerous radicalization can be, our law enforcement agencies are more effective and vigilant than ever. We have taken out tens of thousands of terrorists, including Bin Laden.

The global coalition we’re leading against ISIL has taken out their leaders and taken away about half their territory. ISIL will be destroyed. And no one who threatens America will ever be safe.

And all who serve or have served — it has been the honor of my lifetime to be your commander-in-chief.

And we all owe you a deep debt of gratitude.

But, protecting our way of life, that’s not just the job of our military. Democracy can buckle when it gives into fear. So just as we as citizens must remain vigilant against external aggression, we must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are.

And that’s why for the past eight years I’ve worked to put the fight against terrorism on a firmer legal footing. That’s why we’ve ended torture, worked to close Gitmo, reformed our laws governing surveillance to protect privacy and civil liberties.

That’s why I reject discrimination against Muslim Americans...

... who are just as patriotic as we are.

That’s why...

That’s why we cannot withdraw...

That’s why we cannot withdraw from big global fights to expand democracy and human rights and women’s rights and LGBT rights.

No matter how imperfect our efforts, no matter how expedient ignoring such values may seem, that’s part of defending America. For the fight against extremism and intolerance and sectarianism and chauvinism are of a piece with the fight against authoritarianism and nationalist aggression. If the scope of freedom and respect for the rule of law shrinks around the world, the likelihood of war within and between nations increases, and our own freedoms will eventually be threatened.

So let’s be vigilant, but not afraid. ISIL will try to kill innocent people. But they cannot defeat America unless we betray our Constitution and our principles in the fight.

Rivals like Russia or China cannot match our influence around the world — unless we give up what we stand for, and turn ourselves into just another big country that bullies smaller neighbors.

Which brings me to my final point — our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

All of us, regardless of party, should be throwing ourselves into the task of rebuilding our democratic institutions.

When voting rates in America are some of the lowest among advanced democracies, we should be making it easier, not harder, to vote.

When trust in our institutions is low, we should reduce the corrosive influence of money in our politics, and insist on the principles of transparency and ethics in public service. When Congress is dysfunctional, we should draw our districts to encourage politicians to cater to common sense and not rigid extremes.

But remember, none of this happens on its own. All of this depends on our participation; on each of us accepting the responsibility of citizenship, regardless of which way the pendulum of power happens to be swinging.

Our Constitution is a remarkable, beautiful gift. But it’s really just a piece of parchment. It has no power on its own. We, the people, give it power. We, the people, give it meaning — with our participation, and with the choices that we make and the alliances that we forge.

Whether or not we stand up for our freedoms. Whether or not we respect and enforce the rule of law, that’s up to us. America is no fragile thing. But the gains of our long journey to freedom are not assured.

In his own farewell address, George Washington wrote that self-government is the underpinning of our safety, prosperity, and liberty, but “from different causes and from different quarters much pains will be taken... to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth.”

And so we have to preserve this truth with “jealous anxiety;” that we should reject “the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties” that make us one.

America, we weaken those ties when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character aren’t even willing to enter into public service. So course with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are seen, not just as misguided, but as malevolent. We weaken those ties when we define some of us as more American than others.

When we write off the whole system as inevitably corrupt. And when we sit back and blame the leaders we elect without examining our own role in electing them.

It falls to each of us to be those anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy. Embrace the joyous task we have been given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours because, for all our outward differences, we in fact all share the same proud type, the most important office in a democracy, citizen.

Citizen. So, you see, that’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when you own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing.

If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clip board, get some signatures, and run for office yourself.

Show up, dive in, stay at it. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose. Presuming a reservoir in goodness, that can be a risk. And there will be times when the process will disappoint you. But for those of us fortunate enough to have been part of this one and to see it up close, let me tell you, it can energize and inspire. And more often than not, your faith in America and in Americans will be confirmed. Mine sure has been.

Over the course of these eight years, I’ve seen the hopeful faces of young graduates and our newest military officers. I have mourned with grieving families searching for answers, and found grace in a Charleston church. I’ve seen our scientists help a paralyzed man regain his sense of touch. I’ve seen Wounded Warriors who at points were given up for dead walk again.

I’ve seen our doctors and volunteers rebuild after earthquakes and stop pandemics in their tracks. I’ve seen the youngest of children remind us through their actions and through their generosity of our obligations to care for refugees or work for peace and, above all, to look out for each other. So that faith that I placed all those years ago, not far from here, in the power of ordinary Americans to bring about change, that faith has been rewarded in ways I could not have possibly imagined.

And I hope your faith has too. Some of you here tonight or watching at home, you were there with us in 2004 and 2008, 2012.

Maybe you still can’t believe we pulled this whole thing off.

Let me tell you, you’re not the only ones.

Michelle...

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson of the South Side...

... for the past 25 years you have not only been my wife and mother of my children, you have been my best friend.

You took on a role you didn’t ask for. And you made it your own with grace and with grit and with style, and good humor.

You made the White House a place that belongs to everybody.

And a new generation sets its sights higher because it has you as a role model.

You have made me proud, and you have made the country proud.

Malia and Sasha...

... under the strangest of circumstances you have become two amazing young women.

You are smart and you are beautiful. But more importantly, you are kind and you are thoughtful and you are full of passion.

... you wore the burden of years in the spotlight so easily. Of all that I have done in my life, I am most proud to be your dad.

To Joe Biden...

... the scrappy kid from Scranton...

... who became Delaware’s favorite son. You were the first decision I made as a nominee, and it was the best.

Not just because you have been a great vice president, but because in the bargain I gained a brother. And we love you and Jill like family. And your friendship has been one of the great joys of our lives.

To my remarkable staff, for eight years, and for some of you a whole lot more, I have drawn from your energy. And every day I try to reflect back what you displayed. Heart and character. And idealism. I’ve watched you grow up, get married, have kids, start incredible new journeys of your own.

Even when times got tough and frustrating, you never let Washington get the better of you. You guarded against cynicism. And the only thing that makes me prouder than all the good that we’ve done is the thought of all the amazing things that you are going to achieve from here.

And to all of you out there — every organizer who moved to an unfamiliar town, every kind family who welcomed them in, every volunteer who knocked on doors, every young person who cast a ballot for the first time, every American who lived and breathed the hard work of change — you are the best supporters and organizers anybody could ever hope for, and I will forever be grateful. Because you did change the world.

And that’s why I leave this stage tonight even more optimistic about this country than when we started. Because I know our work has not only helped so many Americans; it has inspired so many Americans — especially so many young people out there — to believe that you can make a difference; to hitch your wagon to something bigger than yourselves.

Let me tell you, this generation coming up — unselfish, altruistic, creative, patriotic — I’ve seen you in every corner of the country. You believe in a fair, and just, and inclusive America; you know that constant change has been America’s hallmark, that it’s not something to fear but something to embrace, you are willing to carry this hard work of democracy forward. You’ll soon outnumber any of us, and I believe as a result the future is in good hands.

My fellow Americans, it has been the honor of my life to serve you. I won’t stop; in fact, I will be right there with you, as a citizen, for all my remaining days. But for now, whether you are young or whether you’re young at heart, I do have one final ask of you as your president — the same thing I asked when you took a chance on me eight years ago.

I am asking you to believe. Not in my ability to bring about change — but in yours.

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written:

Yes, we can.

Yes, we did.

Thank you. God bless you. And may God continue to bless the United States of America. Thank you.

Speech transcription taken from The New York Times

Obama's full speech from the Democratic National Convention 2016

OBAMA: Thank you!

Thank you so much! Thank you everybody.

Thank you. Thank you.

OBAMA: Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you! Thank you!

Thank you, everybody.

AUDIENCE: Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

Thank you so much, everybody!

I love you back!

Hello, America! Hello, Democrats!

So 12 years ago tonight I addressed this convention for the very first time.

You met my two little girls, Malia and Sasha, now two amazing young women who just fill me with pride.

You fell for my brilliant wife and partner, Michelle...

...who has made me a better father and a better man, who has gone on to inspire our nation as first lady and who somehow hasn't aged a day.

I know, the same cannot be said for me. My girls remind me all the time. Wow, you've changed so much, daddy.

OBAMA: And then they try to clean it up. Not bad, just more mature.

And it's true, I was so young that first time in Boston.

And look, I'll admit it, maybe I was a little nervous addressing such a big crowd. But I was filled with faith; faith in America, the generous, bighearted, hopeful country that made my story, that made all of our stories possible.

A lot's happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war and it's been tested by recession and all manner of challenges, I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am even more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.

How could I not be, after all that we've achieved together?

After the worst recession in 80 years, we've fought our way back. We've seen deficits come down, 401(k)s recover, an auto industry set new records, unemployment reach eight-year lows, and our businesses create 15 million new jobs.

After a century of trying, we declared that health care in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody.

After decades of talk, we finally began to wean ourselves off foreign oil, we doubled our production of clean energy.

We brought more of our troops home to their families, and we delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.

(APPLAUSE) Through diplomacy, we shut down Iran's nuclear weapons program, we opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba, brought nearly 200 nations together around a climate agreement that could save this planet for our children.

We put policies in place to help students with loans, protect consumers from fraud, cut veteran homelessness almost in half. And through countless acts of quiet courage, America learned that love has no limits, and marriage equality is now a reality across the land.

By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started. And through every victory and every setback, I've insisted that change is never easy, and never quick; that we wouldn't meet all of our challenges in one term, or one presidency, or even in one lifetime.

So tonight, I'm here to tell you that yes, we've still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven-and-a-half years. We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer; our homeland more secure, and our world more peaceful and sustainable for the next generation.

We're not done perfecting our union, or living up to our founding creed that all of us are created equal, all of us are free in the eyes of God.

And that work involves a big choice this November. I think it's fair to say, this is not your typical election. It's not just a choice between parties or policies, the usual debates between left and right. This is a more fundamental choice about who we are as a people, and whether we stay true to this great American experiment in self-government.

Look, we Democrats have always had plenty of differences with the Republican Party, and there's nothing wrong with that. it's precisely this contest of ideas that pushes our country forward.

But what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn't particularly Republican and it sure wasn't conservative. What we heard was a deeply pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other and turn away from the rest of the world. There were no serious solutions to pressing problems, just the fanning of resentment and blame and anger and hate. And that is not the America I know.

The America I know is full of courage and optimism and ingenuity. The America I know is decent and generous. Sure, we have real anxieties about paying the bills and protecting our kids, caring for a sick parent. We get frustrated with political gridlock and worry about racial divisions. We are shocked and saddened by the madness of Orlando or Nice. There are pockets of America that never recovered from factory closures, men who took pride in hard work and providing for their families who now feel forgotten, parents who wonder whether their kids will have the same opportunities we had.

All of that is real. We're challenged to do better, to be better. But as I've traveled this country, through all 50 states, as I've rejoiced with you and mourned with you, what I have also seen, more than anything, is what is right with America.

OBAMA: I see people working hard and starting businesses. I see people teaching kids and serving our country. I see engineers inventing stuff, doctors coming up with new cures. I see a younger generation full of energy and new ideas, not constrained by what is, ready to seize what ought to be.

And most of all, I see Americans of every party, every background, every faith who believe that we are stronger together, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, young, old, gay, straight, men, women, folks with disabilities, all pledging allegiance, under the same proud flag, to this big, bold country that we love.

That's what I see! That's the America that I know!

And there is only one candidate in this race who believes in that future, has devoted her life to it; a mother and grandmother who would do anything to help our children thrive, a leader with real plans to break down barriers and blast through glass ceilings and widen the circle of opportunity to every single American, the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton.

AUDIENCE: Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!

OBAMA: That's right. That's right.

Let me tell you, eight years ago, you may remember Hillary and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination. We battled for a year-and- a-half. Let me tell you, it was tough because Hillary was tough. I was worn out.

She was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger Rogers it was backwards in heels.

And every time I thought I might have that race won, Hillary just came back stronger.

But after it was all over, I asked Hillary to join my team.

And she was a little surprised, some of my staff were surprised.

But ultimately said yes because she knew that what was at stake was bigger than either of us.

And for four years, for four years, I had a front-row seat to her intelligence, her judgment and her discipline. I came to realize that her unbelievable work ethic wasn't for praise, it wasn't for attention, that she was in this for everyone who needs a champion.

I understood that after all these years, she has never forgotten just who she's fighting for.

Hillary's still got the tenacity that she had as a young woman working at the Children's Defense Fund, going door to door to ultimately make sure kids with disabilities could get a quality education.

She's still got the heart she showed as our first lady, working with Congress to help push through a Children's Health Insurance Program that to this day protects millions of kids.

She's still seared with the memory of every American she met who lost loved ones on 9/11, which is why, as a senator from New York, she fought so hard for funding to help first responders, to help the city rebuild; why, as secretary of state, she sat with me in the Situation Room and forcefully argued in favor of the mission that took out bin Laden.

You know, nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office. You can read about it, you can study it. But until you've sat at that desk, you don't know what it's like to manage a global crisis or send young people to war. But Hillary's been in the room, she's been part of those decisions.

She knows what's at stake in the decisions our government makes, what's at stake for the working family, for the senior citizen, for the small-business owner, for the soldier, for the veteran. And even in the midst of crisis, she listens to people and she keeps her cool and she treats everybody with respect. And no matter how daunting the odds, no matter how much people try to knock her down, she never, ever quits.

That's the Hillary I know. That's the Hillary I've come to admire. And that's why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman, not me, not Bill, nobody more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.

I hope you don't mind, Bill, but I was just telling the truth, man.

And by the way, in case you were wondering about her judgment, take a look at her choice of running mate. Tim Kaine is as good a man, as humble and as committed a public servant as anybody that I know. I know his family. I love Anne, I love their kids. He will be a great vice president, he will make Hillary a better president, just like my dear friend and brother Joe Biden has made me a better president.

Now, Hillary has real plans to address the concerns she's heard from you on the campaign trail. She's got specific ideas to invest in new jobs, to help workers share in their company's profits, to help put kids in preschool, and put students through college without taking on a ton of debt. That's what leaders do.

And then there's Donald Trump.

(AUDIENCE JEERS)

Don't boo; vote!

You know, the Donald is not really a plans guy. He's not really a facts guy, either.

He calls himself a business guy, which is true, but I have to say, I know plenty of businessmen and women who've achieved remarkable success without leaving a trail of lawsuits and unpaid workers and people feeling like they got cheated.

Does anyone really believe that a guy who's spent his 70 years on this Earth showing no regard for working people is suddenly going to be your champion? Your voice? Hey, if so, you should vote for him.

But if you're someone who's truly concerned about paying your bills, if you're really concerned about pocketbook issues and seeing the economy grow and creating more opportunity for everybody, then the choice isn't even close. If you want someone with a lifelong track record of fighting for higher wages and better benefits and a fairer tax code and a bigger voice for workers and stronger regulations on Wall Street, then you should vote for Hillary Clinton.

And if you're rightly concerned about who's going to keep you and your family safe in a dangerous world, well, the choice is even clearer. Hillary Clinton is respected around the world, not just by leaders, but by the people they serve.

I have to say this. People outside of the United States do not understand what's going on in this election, they really don't.

Because they know Hillary, they've seen her work. She's worked closely with our intelligence teams, our diplomats, our military. And she has the judgment and the experience and the temperament to meet the threat from terrorism. It's not new to her. Our troops have pounded ISIL without mercy, taking out their leaders, taking back territory. And I know Hillary won't relent until ISIL is destroyed.

She will finish the job and she'll do it without resorting to torture or banning entire religions from entering our country. She is fit and she is ready to be the next commander in chief.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump calls our military a disaster. Apparently, he doesn't know the men and women who make up the strongest fighting force the world has ever known.

OBAMA: He suggests America is weak. He must not hear the billions of men and women and children, from the Baltics to Burma, who still look to America to be the light of freedom and dignity and human rights. He cozies up to Putin, praises Saddam Hussein, tells our NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection.

Well, America's promises do not come with a price tag. We meet our commitments. We bear our burdens. That's one of the reasons why almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago when I took office.

America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness does not depend on Donald Trump.

In fact, it doesn't depend on any one person. And that, in the end, may be the biggest difference in this election, the meaning of our democracy.

Ronald Reagan called America "a shining city on a hill." Donald Trump calls it "a divided crime scene" that only he can fix. It doesn't matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they've been in decades, because he's not actually offering any real solutions to those issues. He's just offering slogans, and he's offering fear. He's betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election.

And that's another bet that Donald Trump will lose. And the reason he'll lose it is because he's selling the American people short. We are not a fragile people, we're not a frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don't look to be ruled.

Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that we the people can form a more perfect union. That's who we are. That's our birthright, the capacity to shape our own destiny.

That's what drove patriots to choose revolution over tyranny and our GIs to liberate a continent. It's what gave women the courage to reach for the ballot and marchers to cross a bridge in Selma and workers to organize and fight for collective bargaining and better wages.

America has never been about what one person says he'll do for us. It's about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard and slow and sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.

And that's what Hillary Clinton understands. She knows that this is a big, diverse country, she has seen it, she's traveled, she's talked to folks and she understands that most issues are rarely black and white. She understands that even when you're 100 percent right, getting things done requires compromise. That democracy doesn't work if we constantly demonize each other.

She knows that for progress to happen, we have to listen to each other and see ourselves in each other, and fight for our principles, but also fight to find common ground, no matter how elusive that may sometimes seem.

Hillary knows we can work through racial divides in this country when we realize the worry black parents feel when their son leaves the house isn't so different than what a brave cop's family feels when he puts on the blue and goes to work, that we can honor police and treat every community fairly. We can do that.

And she knows that acknowledging problems that have festered for decades isn't making race relations worse, it's creating the possibility for people of good will to join and make things better.

Hillary knows we can insist on a lawful and orderly immigration system while still seeing striving students and their toiling parents as loving families, not criminals or rapists, families that came here for the same reasons our forebears came, to work and to study and to make a better life, in a place where we can talk and worship and love as we please. She knows their dream is quintessentially American, and the American dream is something no wall will ever contain. (APPLAUSE)

These are the things that Hillary knows. It can be frustrating, this business of democracy. Trust me, I know. Hillary knows, too. When the other side refuses to compromise, progress can stall. People are hurt by the inaction. Supporters can grow impatient and worry that you're not trying hard enough, that you've maybe sold out.

But I promise you, when we keep at it, when we change enough minds, when we deliver enough votes, then progress does happen. And if you doubt that, just ask the 20 million more people who have health care today. Just ask the Marine who proudly serves his country without hiding the husband that he loves.

Democracy works, America, but we gotta want it, not just during an election year, but all the days in between.

So if you agree that there's too much inequality in our economy, and too much money in our politics, we all need to be as vocal and as organized and as persistent as Bernie Sanders' supporters have been during this election.

We all need to get out and vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, and then hold them accountable until they get the job done.

That's right, feel the Bern!

If you want more justice in the justice system, then we've all got to vote, not just for a president, but for mayors and sheriffs and state's attorneys and state legislators. That's where the criminal law is made. And we've got to work with police and protesters until laws and practices are changed. That's how democracy works.

If you want to fight climate change, we've got to engage not only young people on college campuses, we've got to reach out to the coal miner who's worried about taking care of his family, the single mom worried about gas prices.

If you want to protect our kids and our cops from gun violence, we've got to get the vast majority of Americans, including gun owners, who agree on things like background checks to be just as vocal and determined as the gun lobby that blocks change through every funeral that we hold. That's how change happens.

Look, Hillary's got her share of critics. She has been caricatured by the right and by some on the left. She has been accused of everything you can imagine and some things that you cannot.

But she knows that's what happens when you're under a microscope for 40 years.

She knows that sometimes during those 40 years she's made mistakes, just like I have, just like we all do. That's what happens when we try. That's what happens when you're the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described, not the timid souls who criticize from the sidelines, but someone "who is actually in the arena, who strives valiantly, who errs, but who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement."

Hillary Clinton is that woman in the arena. She's been there for us, even if we haven't always noticed.

And if you're serious about our democracy, you can't afford to stay home just because she might not align with you on every issue. You've got to get in the arena with her, because democracy isn't a spectator sport. America isn't about "yes he will." It's about "yes we can." And we're going to carry Hillary to victory this fall, because that's what the moment demands.

OBAMA: Yes, we can! Not yes, she can; not yes, I can; yes, we can!

You know, there's been a lot of talk in this campaign about what America's lost, people who tell us that our way of life is being undermined by pernicious changes and dark forces beyond our control. They tell voters there's a "real America" out there that must be restored.

This isn't an idea, by the way, that started with Donald Trump. It's been peddled by politicians for a long time, probably from the start of our republic. And it's got me thinking about the story I told you 12 years ago tonight about my Kansas grandparents and the things they taught me when I was growing up.

See, my grandparents, they came from the heartland. Their ancestors began settling there about 200 years ago. I don't know if they had their birth certificates, but they were there.

They were Scotch-Irish mostly, farmers, teachers, ranch hands, pharmacists, oil rig workers. Hardy, small-town folks. Some were Democrats, but a lot of them, maybe even most of them were Republicans, the party of Lincoln. And my grandparents explained that folks in these parts, they didn't like show-offs, they didn't admire braggarts or bullies.

They didn't respect mean-spiritedness or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, they valued traits like honesty and hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility; helping each other out. That's what they believed in. True things, things that last, the things we try to teach our kids.

And what my grandparents understood was that these values weren't limited to Kansas. They weren't limited to small towns. These values could travel to Hawaii.

(APPLAUSE) They could travel even the other side of the world, where my mother would end up working to help poor women get a better life trying to apply those values. My grandparents knew these values weren't reserved for one race; they could be passed down to a half- Kenyan grandson, or a half-Asian granddaughter; in fact, they were the same values Michelle's parents, the descendants of slaves, taught their own kids living in a bungalow on the south side of Chicago.

They knew these values were exactly what drew immigrants here, and they believed that the children of those immigrants were just as American as their own, whether they wore a cowboy hat or a yarmulke, a baseball cap or a hijab.

America has changed over the years. But these values that my grandparents taught me, they haven't gone anywhere. They're as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots is what's in here. That's what matters.

And that's why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries and blend it into something uniquely our own. That's why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That's why our military can look the way it does, every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.

That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection, that common creed. We don't fear the future; we shape it, embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.

That's what Hillary Clinton understands. This fighter, this stateswoman, this mother and grandmother, this public servant, this patriot, that's the America she's fighting for.

And that is why I have confidence, as I leave this stage tonight, that the Democratic Party is in good hands. My time in this office, it hasn't fixed everything. As much as we've done, there's still so much I want to do. But for all the tough lessons I've had to learn, for all the places I've fallen short, I've told Hillary, and I'll tell you what's picked me back up, every single time: It's been you, the American people.

(APPLAUSE) It's the letter I keep on my wall from a survivor in Ohio who twice almost lost everything to cancer, but urged me to keep fighting for health care reform, even when the battle seemed lost. Do not quit.

It's the painting I keep in my private office, a big-eyed, green owl with blue wings, made by a 7-year-old girl who was taken from us in Newtown, given to me by her parents so I wouldn't forget, a reminder of all the parents who have turned their grief into action.

It's the small-business owner in Colorado who cut most of his own salary so he wouldn't have to lay off any of his workers in the recession because, he said, that wouldn't have been in the spirit of America.

It's the conservative in Texas who said he disagreed with me on everything, but appreciated that, like him, I try to be a good dad.

It's the courage of the young soldier from Arizona who nearly died on the battlefield in Afghanistan, but who has learned to speak again and walk again, and earlier this year, stepped through the door of the Oval Office on his own power, to salute and shake my hand.

It is every American who believed we could change this country for the better, so many of you who'd never been involved in politics, who picked up phones and hit the streets and used the internet in amazing new ways that I didn't really understand, but made change happen. You are the best organizers on the planet, and I am so proud of all the change that you made possible.

Time and again, you've picked me up. And I hope sometimes I've picked you up, too.

And tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me.

I ask you to carry her the same way you carried me. Because you're who I was talking about 12 years ago, when I talked about hope. It's been you who've fueled my dogged faith in our future, even when the odds were great, even when the road is long. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope!

America, you have vindicated that hope these past eight years.

Speech transcription taken from The Washington Post

By Adam Cheung

By Daisy Jones

By Shaad D'Souza

By Jack King

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A Masterclass With Barack And Michelle Obama’s Speechwriter

By Liam Freeman

It was the summer of 1998, the end of her junior year of college, when Sarah Hurwitz fell in love with the art form of writing the perfect speech, having scored an internship at the White House in then Vice President Al Gore’s speechwriting office. “Every day his staff used words to move, inspire, comfort and empower people,” she recalls. “I still can’t imagine a better way to spend a career.”

And what an extraordinary career Hurwitz’s has been. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she became the chief speechwriter for Hillary Rodham Clinton on her 2008 presidential campaign, eventually returning to the White House where she served as the head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama and as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017.

By Kerry McDermott

Here, Hurwitz shares 11 nuggets of speechwriting wisdom that she’s garnered along the way so that you can shine at your next public address, whether that be a televised political debate, work presentation, or a toast at your best friend's wedding.

Channel the person who is speaking

“The true art of speechwriting isn’t scripting someone, it’s channelling their voice. My first step when writing a speech for Mrs Obama would be to sit down with her and ask, ‘What would you like to say?’ She knows who she is and she always knows what she wants to say. She’s also a naturally gifted speaker and writer, so I’d transcribe as she talked — forming the basis of the first draft.”

Research and understand your audience

“Who are you talking to? What are they concerned about? Why are you speaking to them? How well do they know you? What’s the venue? If Mrs Obama was speaking at a university, for example, it was important to understand the history and student body of that university. If you're giving a toast at your best friend's wedding, you need to know if you can tell a story that's a bit edgy, or will their family get offended?”

Know that structure is destiny

“If you have a bad structure, you can’t have a good speech. Every paragraph should flow logically from one to the next. When I'm trying to figure out the structure of a speech, I’ll often print it out and cut it up with scissors so I can move parts around. It’s only then that I realise the order is wrong, or I see that I’m repeating myself, or I notice that certain passages could be combined.”

Seek multiple opinions  

“It’s really important to ask other people to look at your speech — as many as possible — especially if you're speaking to a community that you don't know well. You need to find someone from that audience who understands its cultural sensitivities and norms, so you speak in a way that inspires people rather than causing offence.”

Throw the rulebook out of the window

“Writing to be read and writing to be heard are two very different skills. Spoken language doesn’t need to conform to grammar and punctuation norms. I often use ellipses instead of commas to indicate pauses because they’re easier to see. It’s fine to space things weirdly on the page or add notations if it helps you — all that matters is how the words sound coming out of your mouth.

“With that in mind, you should edit out loud. Don’t just sit looking at your computer screen — print the speech out, practise delivering it and edit as you go.”

By Ellie Pithers

By Alexandre Marain

By Joy Montgomery

Listening is the key to great speaking

“There were hundreds of occasions when Mrs Obama gave me feedback that ultimately influenced how I write. My drafts would be covered in her handwritten edits: ‘Are the transitions seamless? Is the structure logical? Is this language the most vivid and moving that it can be?’, and I would learn from those edits.

“As I write, I hear her voice in my head saying things like, ‘This part is getting bogged down in the weeds; we're missing the beating heart; we're missing the real human side of this issue.’ Hone your ability to identify the weakest parts that aren’t working.”

Speak like you usually do

“It’s fine to ask yourself, ‘What will make me sound smart, or powerful, or funny?’ or ‘What does the audience want to hear?’ But your first question should really be, ‘What is the deepest, most important truth that I can tell at this particular moment?’ All too often people focus on how they're going to say something rather than on what they're actually going to say.

“Then, when they give a speech, they often take on an overly formal and stiff ‘giving a speech’ voice, or they slip into their professional jargon and use words that no one understands. If something feels unnatural or awkward when you say it, go back and rewrite it until it sounds like you.”

Show, don’t tell

“This may sound like a basic writing tip, but it’s rare that people execute this well. If you’re bored during a speech, it's probably because the person is telling, not showing. Mrs Obama didn’t start her 2016 Democratic National Convention speech by saying: ‘On my daughter's first day of school at the White House, I was nervous, afraid and anxious.’ She said: ‘I will never forget that winter morning as I watched our girls, just seven and 10 years old, pile into those black SUVs with all those big men with guns. And I saw their little faces pressed up against the window, and the only thing I could think was, what have we done?’ It’s such a searing image. Anytime you find yourself using a lot of adjectives, stop, step back, and think about painting a picture for people instead.”

Don’t let technology get in the way

“We’re living in the age of Zoom and many people are delivering speeches virtually, which creates a whole new set of challenges. The audience often has their cameras turned off, or even if they’re on there's a disconnect. For this reason, I’d advise against a lecture-style format on Zoom, instead opt for interview-style — give your host a set of questions to ask you so you can convey your message. This back and forth is more engaging via video calls.”

Watch the clock

“People are distracted today and have limited bandwidth to listen to what you are saying, so it’s really important to focus your message. Do you want them to feel reassured, courageous, fired up — whatever the emotion, really think about that as you’re writing your speech. As for the length, it depends on your venue. If you’re doing a toast at your best friend’s wedding, keep it to five minutes (it’s not your wedding!) and for a keynote speech, no longer than 20 minutes.”

Consider the format

“Unless you have an incredible memory, don’t put yourself under added pressure by trying to learn your speech by heart. That said, what you read from matters. Some speakers are the most comfortable with their speech when it’s written out verbatim. For others, reading a speech word for word feels awkward. Try experimenting with different formats, such as bullet points or cue cards. If you're printing your remarks out on paper, keep the text on the top two-thirds of the page — otherwise, as you get to the bottom of the page, you’ll have to bend your neck to look down, and you’ll end up swallowing your words and breaking eye contact with your audience.”

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How to Communicate Like Barack Obama

• John Baldoni

President Barack Obama is rightly considered an exemplary communicator. His rhetorical skills, an ability to paint pictures with words so that others not only see what he sees but feel it too, are what catapulted him into the national political consciousness. However, in the time since his election, the world has gotten a close-up view […]

President Barack Obama is rightly considered an exemplary communicator. His rhetorical skills, an ability to paint pictures with words so that others not only see what he sees but feel it too, are what catapulted him into the national political consciousness. However, in the time since his election, the world has gotten a close-up view of the variety of communication styles that Obama utilizes to connect with others.

• John Baldoni is an internationally recognized executive coach and leadership educator. His most recent book is MOXIE: The Secret to Bold and Gutsy Leadership .

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How to give a speech like Barack Obama

This afternoon, the United States President, Barack Obama, addressed the party faithful at the Democratic National Convention, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In his oration, Obama outlined the victories of his first term, and took aim at many of the criticisms others have made of it.

It wasn’t the best speech he ever gave. It was less rousing than his ‘Yes we can’ acceptance speech in 2008. Heavy on practical examples of his leadership, it was aimed at addressing his critics as well as inspiring the country, creating a slightly defensive note towards the start.

Nonetheless, Obama on a bad day is still one of the world’s most powerful orators.

This isn’t just about position. Being president, like being the CEO, by its very nature imbues authority.

Position may make people listen. But listening isn’t enough to convince.

Obama’s speeches were breathtakingly good long before he had the authority of the presidency behind him.

We can break why he’s so good into three broad elements: how he looks, how he sounds, and what he says.

How he looks

Obama has perfect posture, which he uses to great effect in his speeches. His head is held high, revealing his strong jaw and steady gaze.

His stance is grounded. He uses his hands sparingly, but when he does, it’s for sharp, pointed motions.

He is young, trim, professional and tall. He looks light, nimble and flexible and alert. His clothes are tailored but they are everyday workwear of the professional man: the suit.

Standing beside him is his beautiful wife, with her no-nonsense intelligence, reaffirming the idea that choosing Obama is an intelligent move. She complements his presentation with her own simple but elegant and fresh dress-sense. She, and their children, make Obama the whole package.

How he sounds

Obama crisply articulates words. He’s always understood.

He also benefits from a deep voice. It’s deeper than that of his former rival, 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, but only slightly deeper than new opponent Mitt Romney’s.

In a study published this year, American researchers changed the depth of voice recordings, before playing them to subjects, asking them who they were more likely to vote for. Their subjects chose the deeper recordings much more often.

Going by this theory, we should expect a closer election than last time.

What he says

Obama’s speeches put substance in simple, poetic language.

Obama makes frequent use of stories. His examples aren’t numbers: they’re people. For example, in today’s speech, when talking about the values he represents, Obama painted a vivid and highly personal picture: “… The values my grandfather defended as a soldier in Patton’s Army; the values that drove my grandmother to work on a bomber assembly line while he was gone,“ he said.

Linguists have long pointed out that Obama’s speeches, like those of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, have a certain musical quality. Short simple lines, motifs often immediately repeated, leading to a tempo that guides and quickens people’s emotions.

‘Yes we can’ had that lyrical quality, as did his closing lines during today’s speech: “Yes, our path is harder – but it leads to a better place. Yes our road is longer – but we travel it together . We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up. “

But finally, what draws all this together is Obama’s relaxation on stage. He doesn’t overdo ‘inspirational’ and ‘powerful’. He has variety. He tells a good joke. He doesn’t look forced.

Most impressively, Obama makes sophisticated, no doubt heavily-crafted oratory look natural. On stage, most of the time, Obama just looks like himself.

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Cody Keenan: How I wrote Barack Obama’s speeches

. . .which he then rewrote. the ex-president’s speechwriter reveals their collaborative art.

US president Barack Obama addressing members of the public at Gollege Green, Dublin, during a ceremony as part of his visit to Ireland in May 2011. Photograph: Alan Betson

My family left Ireland for America seven generations ago. To the best of our knowledge, Patrick Keenan left Cork sometime in the 1770s. He was counted in the first American census. His son, Peter Keenan, was born in America. On my mother’s side, John McThomas left Dublin around the same time, fought for America in the Revolution, and was buried in a national cemetery in Ohio.

As far as I know, I was the first in my family, on either side, to return. My first visit was with my best friend back in 2005. We were broke, relied on the kindness of strangers and camped wherever we could – a town park in Kinsale, a beach outside Galway, a farm in Dingle.

My second visit, in May 2011, was a bit different. Surely, it was something my ancestors could not imagine. I flew over in a highly modified 747, crossing the sea they had sailed, with the first black president of a country they helped settle. Hundreds of people were lined up along Moneygall village’s main street, waving Irish and American flags.

Barack Obama is two generations closer to Ireland than I am. And I know people have a laugh at how Moneygall has made the most of that relationship. But it is not a relationship that should be discounted.

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Much has been made of his Kenyan ancestry. But remember, he only met his father twice. He was raised by his white mother and white grandparents. That side of his family is one he holds just as dear. Moneygall’s favourite great-great-great-grandson really does have a soft spot for Ireland and its people. He revealed as much in his address to the people of Ireland that day, delivered to a throng that had gathered along Dublin’s College Green:

It was remarkable to see the small town where a young shoemaker named Falmouth Kearney, my great-great-great-grandfather, lived his early life. He left during the Great Hunger, as so many Irish did, to seek a new life in the New World. He travelled by ship to New York, where he entered himself into the records as a 'labourer'. He married an American girl from Ohio. They settled in the Midwest. They started a family.

It’s a familiar story, one lived and cherished by Americans of all backgrounds. It’s integral to our national identity. It’s who we are – a nation of immigrants from all over the world…

We call it the American Dream. It is the dream that drew Falmouth Kearney to America from a small village in Ireland. It is the dream that drew my own father to America from a small village in Africa. It is a dream that we have carried forward, sometimes through stormy waters, sometimes at great cost, for more than two centuries.

It’s not something he would have imagined when he was a young Chicago politician, bringing up the rear of the St Patrick’s Day parade, followed only by the sanitation workers picking up the pieces. It is not something that, for my first 26 years or so, I could have imagined, either.

Growing up, I had always taken a keen interest in politics, because my parents argued about it on a regular basis – but I began university with plans of becoming a surgeon. Chemistry class altered those plans pretty quickly. I dedicated myself instead to political science, and after graduation, I moved to Washington DC.

Cody Keenan, who served as director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama. ‘In less than 10 years, I went from mailroom intern in Congress to chief speechwriter in the White House,’ he says. Photograph: Lawrence Jackson/The White House

After a dozen failed interviews, I finally became one of 100 interns under someone for whom I will always be grateful: John F Kennedy’s kid brother, Ted. It remains my best political learning experience.

I was at the Democratic Convention in 2004 when a young state senator from Illinois introduced himself to the country. I must have talked about that speech a lot, because that is when I got my shot. One day, my overworked boss poked his head around the corner and asked, “hey, can you write a speech?”

I had never considered speechwriting. But I lied and said yes. I stayed up all night panicking my way through it. That one led to a few more. And eventually, a colleague connected me with senator Obama's chief speechwriter Jon Favreau. We hit it off, and I became an intern all over again, this time in Chicago, on an upstart presidential campaign; this time the only intern.

And as our poll numbers rose, and our crowds grew, so did my opportunities to write. We won and went to the White House. I moved into a West Wing office with Jon. And I never stopped working my tail off so that when he left, and Obama had to choose a new chief speechwriter, I was the only choice to take his place.

In less than 10 years, I went from mailroom intern in Congress to chief speechwriter in the White House.

What goes into a good speech? Well, the first thing I can tell you is that there’s no alchemy to it; no magic formula. It’s more art than science, and after 3,577 speeches in the White House, I admit a lot of it is not art, either. I have been fortunate, though, to work for someone who views it as a craft; as a way to organise his thoughts into a coherent argument and present them to the world. He takes it seriously. He was anonymous when he walked into that Boston hall in 2004, and a political rock star when he walked out. That is what a speech can do.

To this day, by the way, he reminds me that he wrote that one by himself. All the time.

He’s a frighteningly good writer, which makes my job both harder and easier. Harder because I will stay up all night to get him a draft he will be happy with. Easier because if I do not hit the mark, he is there to back me up. And when it came to any speech of consequence, President Obama was actively involved in the product. We would often begin the process for big speeches by sitting down with him in the Oval Office. We called it “The Download”. He would walk us through what was on his mind, what he wanted to say, and we would type as fast as possible.

He would always begin with the question, “what story are we trying to tell?”

Once we got his download, we would get to work, and get him a draft. He would often work on it himself until well past midnight. And this may sound counter-intuitive, but it was always a good thing to hear that he had a lot of edits. It did not mean he disliked what we put down. It meant we gave him what he needed to do the job.

When I was drafting the Charleston eulogy, for example – the speech in which he sang Amazing Grace – I stayed up for three days straight trying to make it perfect. I handed the draft to him the afternoon before the speech and went home to sleep. Right before I turned in, I got an email from him asking me to come back and meet him at 11 o’clock that night.

He told me he liked the first two pages. But he had rewritten the next two pages in just a few hours. It was annoying. Still, I apologised for what I saw as letting him down. But he stopped me and said, “Brother, we are collaborators. You gave me what I needed. The muse hit. And when you have been thinking about this stuff for 40 years, you will know what you want to say, too.”

Jon was good at building the big case and laying out the big argument. That was not my strength. I went for people’s guts. I wanted to build moral and emotional cases. I wanted to make people feel something. A sense of connection. A sense of belonging. A sense of being heard. That’s a pretty important part of storytelling.

And I think the best story we ever told came in a 2015 speech in Selma, Alabama.

In 1965, a group of mostly black Americans set out to march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery to demand their right to vote. They barely made it across the town bridge before their non-violent protest was met with violent resistance. The images shocked the conscience of the country and pushed President Johnson to call for a Voting Rights Act.

The idea that just 50 years later, a black president would return to commemorate what they did was extraordinary enough. We could have gone with a safe, simple speech commemorating the anniversary. People would have understood the symbolism. It would have been enough.

US president Barack Obama walks alongside Amelia Boynton Robinson (second right), one of the original marchers; first lady Michelle Obama; and US Representative John Lewis (second left), Democrat of Georgia, and also one of the original marchers, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches on March 7th, 2015. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

But the week before, a Republican politician went on television and said this: “I know this is a terrible thing to say . . . ” By the way, if you begin a thought that way, you don’t have to finish it. Free advice. But he continued, “I do not believe that the President loves America . . . He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

I was pissed about it. It was more dog whistle nonsense designed to delegitimise the first African American president – and, I might add, the first president to win more than 51 per cent of the vote twice since Dwight Eisenhower almost 60 years earlier.

“No Drama Obama”, true to form, was not ruffled. He thought it was a comment that merited no response. He did, however, think it was an idea worth taking on. Who gets to decide what it means to love America? Who gets to decide who belongs and who does not? Who gets to decide what patriotism is all about? And we came up with the thesis of that speech:

What could be more American than what happened in this place? What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people, the unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course?

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this, what greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

The rest of that half hour made up my favourite speech. It was our purest collaboration. At one point, I made a joke that our story is too often told, in political speeches at least, as if the Founding Fathers set everything up, some Irish and Italians came over, we beat the Nazis, and here we are. But there is more to our story than that. This felt more complete, more honest. He said well, let’s include some characters from our story. “Go come up with some America.”

I grabbed my speechwriters, and we came up with: “Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, pioneers who braved the unfamiliar, followed by a stampede of farmers and miners, and entrepreneurs and hucksters. Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Susan B Anthony, women who could do as much as any man and then some.” We made it a big open casting call:

Immigrants and Holocaust survivors, Soviet defectors, the Lost Boys of Sudan. Slaves and ranch hands and cowboys and labourers and organisers.

The GIs who liberated a continent and the Tuskeegee Airmen, and Navajo code-talkers, and the Japanese Americans who fought for this country even as their own liberty had been denied. The firefighters who rushed into those buildings on 9/11. The volunteers who signed up to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. The gay Americans whose blood ran in the streets of San Francisco and New York, just as blood ran down that bridge.

The inventors of gospel and jazz and blues, bluegrass and country, and hip-hop and rock and roll, all our very own sound with all the sweet sorrow and reckless joy of freedom.

That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing. We are large, in the words of Whitman, containing multitudes.

If there is one Obama speech I could make people watch, that is it. It was the best, most joyous distillation of the way he sees what this country is and can be. It was the idea that through the hard work of self-government, generations of Americans, often young Americans, often without power or title, often at great risk to themselves, have looked upon our flaws and worked to widen the circle of our founding ideals until they include everybody, and not just some.

That is how I see politics. This collective endeavour; the balance between the realism to see the world as it is, and the idealism to fight for the world as it should be anyway.

It was the exhausting, fulfilling work of those 2,922 days in the White House that gave my career meaning. But when I feel the tugging temptation of cynicism, I reach for my proof point that this whole messy endeavour of democracy can work: the 10 most hopeful days I ever saw in politics.

They began in the darkest way imaginable – a mass shooting in the basement of a Charleston church. A black church. It threatened to reopen the kinds of wounds and spark the kinds of recrimination we saw more recently in Charlottesville. But it did not unfold that way. The families of the victims forgave their killer in court. Then, there was a public recognition of the pain that the Confederate flag stirs in so many citizens, and actual introspection and self-examination that we too rarely see in public life, to the point where that flag finally came down from the South Carolina state capitol.

At the same time, it was a week when the supreme court could rule on any case, at any time, with no heads up. So while we worked on the president’s eulogy for Charleston, we were busy drafting several other statements in case he had to speak quickly.

Thursday morning, boom: Obamacare was upheld as constitutional for the second time. Obama spoke. Friday morning, boom: marriage equality becomes a reality in America. Obama spoke. An hour later, we boarded Marine One to fly to Air Force One, which would ferry us to Charleston.

I was still working in his changes to the eulogy for that afternoon. He had added the lyrics to Amazing Grace overnight. And just before he stepped off the helicopter, he turned and said, “you know, if it feels right, I might sing it”. Exhausted, I simply said “okay”. And that night, we returned to a White House that was no longer white – but bathed in the colours of the rainbow. We wrote 10 speeches in those 10 days – plus a few that never had to see the light of day.

Those 10 days were on my mind as I added these words to President Obama’s farewell address:

Ultimately, that's what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there's an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try to talk with one in real life. If something needs fixing, lace up your shoes and do some organising. If you're disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself. Show up. Dive in. Persevere. Sometimes you'll win. Sometimes you'll lose. Presuming a reservoir of goodness in others can be a risk, and there will be times when the process disappoints you. But for those of us fortunate enough to have been a part of this work, to see it up close, let me tell you, it can energise and inspire. And more often than not, your faith in America – and in Americans – will be confirmed.

– Cody Keenan is a speechwriter who has worked with former US president Barack Obama for more than a decade. From Whence I Came – The Kennedy Legacy, Ireland and America, is edited by Brian Murphy & Donnacha Ó Beacháin. It is published by Merrion Press and dedicated to the memory of former Irish Times columnist Noel Whelan, 1968-2019

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How to give a speech like President Obama

By GQ Staff

Barack Obama has received high praise for delivering a speech that rounded off the Democratic National Convention with some much needed "optimistic high ground", following bitter condemnations of Hillary Clinton's nomination from Bernie Sanders' supporters.

His presidency may have realised less than intended, but Barack Obama has undeniable pizazz -- thanks, in large part, to the crack squad who write his speeches. We asked his ex-Director Of Speechwriting, Jon Favreau, how to kill it on the podium

Begin conversationally

Example: "You know, they said this day would never come." Obama, opening to the Iowa caucuses victory speech, 2008

Favreau: "I tell the president to start speeches in the most organic way possible. You wouldn't start a conversation by saying 'As John F. Kennedy once said...', so you shouldn't start a speech that way either. When he won the Iowa caucuses a lot of people said he should start with a bunch of acknowledgements. I said no, the whole world's going to be watching so he needs a big opening, but it can't be too cheesy. What we came up with was a natural thing to say, but also has a lot of meaning."

Tell riskier jokes

Example: "Just the other day, Matt Damon - I love Matt Damon, love the guy - Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well Matt, I just saw the Adjustment Bureau, so right back at you, buddy." Obama, White House Correspondents' Dinner speech, 2011

Favreau: "It's good to put in jokes that are really funny but not 'appropriate' for a politician to tell. Before the Correspondents' Dinner I'd sit and look at a list of all the jokes we have. We don't try to force a knock-knock humour on the president - he is funniest when he makes wry observations about the absurdity of politics."

Get personal

Example: "Being a teenager isn't easy. It's a time when you're wrestling with a lot of things. When I was in my teens, I was wrestling with all sorts of questions about who I was. I had a white mother and a black father, and my father wasn't around; he had left when I was two." Obama, back-to-school speech, 2010

Favreau: "Personal stories date back as far as Reagan and Clinton. The ones that work tell people why you do the things you do. If you're telling a personal story make it authentic - talk about tough times. I've seen some Cameron speeches and I haven't noticed any personal biography - nor Brown, nor Blair - and it's interesting I haven't."

Fight with humour

Example: "You [Mitt Romney] might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can't visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally." Obama, Democratic National Convention speech, 2012

Favreau: "What might seem like a good needling of the opposition on paper sounds a bit harsher in reality and you won't get the applause. So a little goes a long way - the press will always pick up on it when you try to 'draw a contrast' as we call it. Humour is a great approach. Or look at what we did when we ran against Hillary [Clinton] in the primary: the president rarely used Hillary's name but everyone knew he was talking about her."

More drama!

Example: "I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return." Obama, Democratic National Convention speech, 2012

Favreau: "These lines were going to be at the top of the speech, but we moved them to the end because it was worth having a dramatic moment before speeding up and getting people going again. To do that - to get the best applause - say things like, 'Make your voice heard', 'Are you with me'. That's how Bobby Kennedy would end his speeches."

This article originally appeared on gq.com.au .

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President Barack Obama is rightly considered an exemplary communicator. His rhetorical skills, an ability to paint pictures with words so that others not only see what he sees but feel it too, are what catapulted him into the national political consciousness. However, in the time since his election, the world has gotten a close-up view [...]

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Learning to write like a president sounds

• Weinberg College

Northwestern alumnus Cody Keenan returned to campus this fall to teach a class and share his worldly wisdom as a professional speechwriter who has written or edited more than 2,000 speeches for his boss, former President Barack Obama.

Of those many speeches, Keenan’s favorite goes back to March 2015 when Obama spoke in Selma, Alabama , marking 50 years since "Bloody Sunday" in 1965 when thousands of Americans were brutally assaulted on a march to the state capital in support of voting rights for African Americans.

“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ These are not just words,” Obama declared. “They’re a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny.”

Students examine this critical oration as part of Keenan’s “Speechwriting” class, offered through the political science department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences .

A 2002 graduate of Weinberg College, Keenan returned to campus to teach his first class to college students and impart key lessons that one learns only through doing. There is no great writing, he notes in the syllabus, only great rewriting.

“I remember the Selma speech was our purest collaboration,” he said. “We were lucky enough to have a snow day just before the event. So we sat inside the White House all day, going back and forth on draft after draft. It was just one of those times when each version got better than the last.”

At the start of one recent class, Keenan walked into class fresh off a plane from Washington, D.C., where he still lives and works with Obama as a speechwriter, and as collaborator on an upcoming book. The day’s assignment was to write a eulogy for a well-known — and still living — person. It was a dark week for a number of A-list celebrities, he joked.

Whether a eulogy, persuasive argument or humorous toast, Keenan describes every great speech as a well-crafted story that hits the crowd on an emotional level. To be a successful speechwriter is to help leaders in any industry move audiences, win the battle of ideas and, ultimately, change the world.

“I’m spending more time reading my work aloud to make sure it sounds good to the ear.” — Student Brianna Willis

Suited to a class that dissects every aspect of speechwriting, from inspiration and research to fact-checking and final flourish, Keenan assigns a wide range of essential speeches to illuminate leaders of every era and political stripe.

Required reading and viewing includes “Ain’t I a Woman,” delivered by human rights advocate Sojourner Truth at an Ohio convention in 1851. Senator Robert F. Kennedy invoked his favorite poet , Aeschylus, during a presidential campaign stop in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, to tell the crowd of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. And three days after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush stood atop a pile of rubble to speak through a bullhorn to Ground Zero rescue workers at the World Trade Center site.

In a workshop setting, with tables facing each other, students develop a more collaborative creative process than most are used to.

“I’m now showing my drafts to other writers to break my solitary writing habits,” said senior Brianna Willis.

Since high school, Willis has planned to become a political speechwriter. The Weinberg senior has put a lot of effort toward that goal, including political science classes, participation on the speech team and her work at a speechwriting firm. But Keenan’s class has given her a bump she didn’t realize she needed.

“I’m spending more time reading my work aloud to make sure it sounds good to the ear,” she said. 

For Keenan, his first teaching stint has been a joy. 

“This is the only place I’d fly to once a week to teach a class,” he said. “And you’d have to do a lot to keep me from coming back next fall.”

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7 lessons from Barack Obama that will make you a better presenter

Sep 16, 2018 by maurice decastro in leadership , presentation skills , presentation tips , public speaking.

Former President Barack Obama is noted for his public speaking excellence.

His speeches have changed the way countless people communicate.

He is regarded as one of the worlds most gifted and powerful orators today. His speech to more than a thousand students at the University of Illinois-Urbana was charged with public speaking lessons for all of us. If you have any desire to become a better presenter, here are a few lessons to inspire you.

1. Being serious doesn’t have to be boring

Whilst being a speech calling for action and urgency, Barack Obama opened on a lighter note.

Putting his concerns about American politics aside for a moment, he began saying:

“It is good to be home. It’s good to see corn.”

“It’s good to see corn, beans. I was trying to explain to somebody as we were flying in: ‘That’s corn. That’s beans.’ They were very impressed at my agricultural knowledge .

Whatever your message is, find a moment to not take yourself too seriously.

2. It pays to know your audience

This was a speech that was crafted with a very clear intention and objective. It was designed to make people feel concerned and compelled to vote. Before its earnestness, Barack Obama had clearly done his homework. He aimed to lift the mood as high as he could before delivering his message.

“I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room. I know people are still wondering why I didn’t speak at the 2017 Commencement. The Student Body President sent a very thoughtful invitation, students made a spiffy video, and when I declined, I hear there was speculation that I was boycotting campus until Antonio’s Pizza reopened. So, I want to be clear, I did not take sides in that late-night food debate.”

The better presenter focuses on connecting with their audience. That means knowing as much as you can about them before you stand to speak. Learn as much as you can about your audience in advance.

3. Be very clear on your message

Obama spoke for just over an hour; that’s a long time.

He used every minute wisely and very effectively; ensuring that everything he said supported the reason he had chosen to speak. He had one simple but very clear message.

His hour was used mindfully as a platform to ensure his audience understood and felt it.

“I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is that we are, just what it is that we stand for, and as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen, I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”

If you are not clear on your own message, your audience won’t be either.

Start with a clear, concise and compelling message.

4. Speak in sound bites

A soundbite is something that your audience will easily remember.

It plays a key part in supporting and animating your message. When you are speaking for an hour its very easy to lose your audience. Help your audience to feel the impact of your words.

Choose your words thoughtfully.

“In two months, we have the chance to restore some semblance of sanity to our politics.”

“Just a glance at recent headlines should tell you that this moment really is different. The stakes really are higher. The consequences of any of us sitting on the side-lines are more dire.”

“I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.”

5. Silence truly is golden

In a previous article I wrote, ‘Obama – Master of the pause’, I stated, ‘he is unquestionably the master of the pause.’

For many speakers, two seconds of silence feels like an uncomfortable eternity in their minds. Many don’t appreciate that those two seconds of quiet are a gift to our audience. It allows your message to get through and settle in their minds. It allows them to keep up with us when we have so much to say. Our momentary pause allows them to breathe too.

A pause exudes confidence and gravitas. It sends a clear message to your audience that you care.

If you ‘d like to be a better presenter build pauses into your presentation.

6. Don’t just pause, slow down

Many presenters find themselves in a rush to speak. In the process, they often speak too fast. Audiences struggle to keep up with a rushed pace. Barack Obama is the pacemaker of public speaking too.

The best public speakers and presenters have a conversational tone and pace. It’s easy to keep up with them. They breathe inbetween sentences and they speak with clarity.

Each time Obama speaks he does so with a quiet sincerity. A pace which allows you to follow and understand his every word.

Don’t be in a rush to speak. Give your audience the gift of slowing down, breathing and pausing .

7. Keep it real

Among his many public speaking strengths, is humility. He will give you a momentary glimpse into what is going on his personal as well as professional world. Most audiences warm to the idea of knowing a little more about their speaker. It helps us to relate to them on a human level. This speech was no different. Very early on Obama made a point of telling his audience:

“The truth is, after eight years in the White House, I needed to spend some time one-on-one with Michelle if I wanted to stay married.

And she says hello, by the way. I also wanted to spend some quality time with my daughters, who were suddenly young women on their way out the door. And I should add, by the way, now that I have a daughter in college, I can tell all the students here, your parents suffer.

 They cry privately. It is brutal. So please call. Send a text.”

Whether you’re the former president, CEO, department head, or customer service agent don’t stop there. If you’re a brother, sister, father, mother or simply someone’s partner be that too.

He may be one of my personal favourite speakers but this isn’t an article about politics. It’s an article about impact.

Each of us has an opportunity to lead and make an impact each time we speak. Speaking is easy but doing so with impact is often a challenge. These 7 lessons from Barack Obama’s speech will serve us well. They offer a great start on your journey to becoming a better presenter.

If you need a little help becoming a better presenter:

– Book yourself onto a powerful  public speaking course .

– Invest in some really good one to one  public speaking coaching .

– Get yourself some excellent  presentation training

Image courtesy of: www.flickr.com

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Five Ways to Speak Like Obama

By Sims Wyeth

Updated on: April 20, 2009 / 8:19 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Now that we've got your attention, you should realize, of course, that you don't want to speak like Barack Obama. You want to speak like you. Nevertheless, as a student of the art of public speaking, you can — and should — observe Obama's oratorical skills. The greats all learn from other greats, so don't hesitate. Study Obama's repertoire, take what you like, and use what you can to improve your own public speaking. 

Obama is a master at grabbing and keeping his audience's attention, which is the number one goal of any public speaker. How does he do it? Here are five key lessons from Obama's rhetorical playbook.

1. Talk About the Audience’s Concerns

Notice that when Obama addressed a joint session of Congress for the first time , he told our story before he told his own. He talked about our sleepless nights, for example, and the college admission that might have to be turned down because of a lack of financing.

This was brilliant, and you can do it, too. Start your talk by broadly defining the situation that your listeners face. Then, once you’ve got them nodding their heads in agreement, move on to describe the problems or challenges that are on their minds. Start where the audience is, not where you are. Once you have their attention, you can lead your listeners wherever you want to take them.

2. Keep It Simple

Throughout the presidential campaign, Obama kept his main message — “change you can believe in” — simple and easy to remember. Sure, some pundits mocked its simplicity, but it served its purpose perfectly as the banner at the front of his parade. You, too, can keep it simple, even if you have mountains of research to report.

First, fine-tune your core message . Fierce debate within Obama’s campaign no doubt accompanied the birth of the slogan “change you can believe in,” and similar prolonged discussion may accompany the discovery of your own core message. But once the decision has been made, don’t let that debate show. Chisel away at your topic until you can reduce your presentation to a core message. Once you achieve this, all your complex ideas can march behind it.

This is as true for business presentations as it is for political campaigns. Granted, your content may be nuanced and detailed, but so were Obama’s policy positions. He used his simple slogan to make us believe he was the politician for change — something so many Americans longed for — and he appealed to us to have faith (to believe ) in the change he was offering us. Obama won people through a simple slogan, which then allowed him to more easily serve up his ideas about meaty topics such as health care, terrorism, and the crumbling economy.

We make a serious error if we mistake a complete argument for a persuasive one. All audiences, no matter how sophisticated, have limited attention spans and a limited ability to retain detailed spoken information. Don’t fear that you’re leaving details out; you must be selective. After all, what good is a thorough and detailed argument if it is inaccessible?

3. Anticipate What Your Audience Is Thinking

Obama and his speechwriters are certainly aware of the great line by Goethe, “Every word that is uttered evokes the idea of its opposite.” What this means is that when you express one view, the odds are high that people will reflexively think about other, unmentioned aspects of the topic.

A presentation that does not deal with this “evoking of opposites” loses the audience’s attention because it fails to address the questions and concerns that come up in people’s minds. So anticipate it. Show your audience that you understand the contrary view better than they do, and explain why your proposal or argument is still superior.

Obama did this effectively in his speech on race , in which he attempted to distance himself from the inflammatory Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Obama pointed out, for example, that he won primaries in former Confederate states and that he had built a “powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.” But he also acknowledged what was undoubtedly on people’s minds when he said, “This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign.” He went on to say that, yes, Reverend Wright’s sermons were controversial, but, no, that’s not why he must be rebuked. He said that, yes, the clips of Reverend Wright on YouTube make him look terrible , but, no, that’s not the full measure of the man.

His speech was powerful and widely praised. It was effective in part because Obama let everyone know that he had thought a lot about race, and in particular about both sides of the controversy surrounding his former pastor.

Attack your topics this way, too, and you will be in charge of the conversation. This approach will not only grab and hold the attention of your listeners, but it will also help you win people into your camp, which is what you need to do if, say, your goal is to persuade your board of directors of the wisdom of a seemingly risky partnership.

4. Learn to Pause

Obama has mastered the art of pausing. Just check out his presidential acceptance speech in Chicago to see this skill at work. He pauses to let us catch up with him. He pauses to let his words resonate. He pauses, in a sense, to let us rest. Pauses also give the impression of composure and thoughtfulness.

Here’s an exercise to help you learn to pause.

• Mark up your paragraphs / in this manner / into the shortest possible phrases. / First, / whisper it, / breathing / at all the breath marks. / Then, / speak it / in the same way. / Do this / with a different paragraph / every day.

Here’s what the opening paragraph of Obama’s remarks would look like:

• “If there is anyone out there / who still doubts / that America is a place / where all things are possible, / who still wonders / if the dream of our founders / is alive in our time, / who still questions / the power of our democracy, / tonight / is your answer.”

Where you pause is up to you; there are no hard and fast rules. But try it. Slowly inhale to the count of three at each breath mark. Speak as though you had plenty of time. The goal / of this exercise / is to teach your body / to slow down.

5. Master the Body Language of Leadership

Obama’s body language is relaxed and fluid. It does not display tension or fear. He’s calm and assertive — which is exactly what you need to be to get people to comply with your requests. For the ultimate in Obama smoothness, watch his entrance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show .

To achieve the body language that’s effective for you, focus on a single attribute — for example, calm — and practice implementing it in the basic motions of your day, from getting dressed in the morning, to leaving your home for work, to greeting your friends and colleagues. Research in the Scientific American suggests that focusing on one word is the most effective way to learn a new behavior. It will probably feel forced at first, but don’t worry. It will soon become natural, and eventually your body language will communicate the right mix of calm and assertiveness.

Finally, you’ll need to rehearse. Practice calmly walking up to the lectern or the front of the room. Arrange your papers calmly. Look out to the audience with a sense of command, with assertiveness. Let the silence hang for a moment, and only then deliver your opening remarks.

Calmness begets a sense of authority. Behave as if you are in control, and you will in fact gain control and command attention.

About the Author

Sims Wyeth is a trainer and consultant in speeches, presentations, and high stakes conversations.

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Lesson Plan: So You Want To Be A Presidential Speechwriter?

Relationship Between Ideas and Speeches

Former Senior Speechwriter for the Obama Administration Sarada Peri and Former Senior Speechwriter for the George W. Bush Administration John McConnell discuss the relationship between ideas and speeches in their work. This session was from the Presidential Ideas Festival hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Description

Featuring former Senior Speechwriter for the Obama Administration Sarada Peri, former Senior Speechwriter for the George W. Bush Administration John McConnell, and former Deputy Director of Speechwriting for the Obama Administration Kyle O'Connor speaking at a session during the Presidential Ideas Festival hosted by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, this lesson guides students through a review of the roles and responsibilities of Presidential speechwriters. Opening with reflective questions that ask students to consider the purpose of Presidential speechwriters, students then view an introductory video clip in which Peri and McConnell discuss the relationship between ideas and speeches in their work. From there, students engage in a choice board Google Slides activity where they choose to watch one of three sets of videos that describe the role of Presidential speechwriters and the process of Presidential speechwriting. After completing this portion of the lesson, students share their findings with their peers. The lesson then includes an optional application activity, where students simulate the roles of President and speechwriter. The lesson concludes with a summative writing prompt which asks students whether or not they would want to be a Presidential speechwriter and why.

This lesson offers several options for you to use with your students whether you are teaching in class, using a hybrid model, or engaging through distance learning. It can be completed in steps as a class or students can move at their own pace and complete the activities independently.

You can post links to the videos in the lesson along with the related handouts and engage in discussion to share responses on a discussion board or learning management system.

You can also save and share the following Google resources for students to use with this lesson.

Handout: Graphic Organizer (Google Doc).

Handout: Choice Board (Google Slides).

In Google, choose "File" then "Make a Copy" to get your own copy. You can make any needed adjustments in the instructions such as which activities students need to complete, when it is due, etc. and then make it available to them via Google.

Pose the following brainstorming questions to your students, directing them to record their responses in their graphic organizer, share with a partner, and then with the class if they choose.

• Why do Presidents of the United States hire people to write their speeches?
• What do you think the day-to-day job of a presidential speechwriter is like?

INTRODUCTION

Play the following introductory video clip of former Senior Speechwriter for the Obama Administration Sarada Peri and former Senior Speechwriter for the George W. Bush Administration John McConnell discussing the relationship between ideas and speeches in their work. Direct your students to answer the related questions on their graphic organizer.

Clip #1: Relationship Between Ideas and Speeches (5:05).

• What does Sarada Peri mean when she says ideas “don’t get crystallized until they get litigated on the page?”
• Describe speech writing as “a process job.” Who do speechwriters talk to first once they’re assigned to write a speech?
• According to John McConnell, what role did speechwriters have in the George W. Bush administration?
• Summarize McConnell’s speechwriting experience from the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Direct your students to their graphic organizers to view and define the vocabulary terms that will appear in the lesson in the chart in their graphic organizer handout. The vocabulary words are also listed to the right on this webpage. We recommend having your students define and present the terms in a jigsaw activity to save time.

Depending on time and resources, you may consider having your students define and present the terms in a Frayer's Model activity , where each student takes one or two items. Students can then post their models around the room for reference throughout the lesson. Note: this is not an all-encompassing list of terms included in each video. We recommend you preview the video clips to determine any necessary additions/subtractions to this list for your specific students.

ENGAGEMENT CHOICE BOARD

Provide your students with access to the lesson's choice board (Google Slides).

Direct your students to select one of the three sets of videos to study in detail. The sets are listed below. Have your students view the three video clips in their selected set, recording their answers to the questions on each slide.

Then, guide your students as they share their findings with the class and record their peers' findings in their own choice board documents.

SET #1 - First Clip: The Role of Audience [Clip #2] (3:43).

• What is always the “first question” that John McConnell asks when writing a speech? Why?
• Based on the clip, how does knowing who the audience is inform the writing of a speech?
• Why is every speech “important,” according to McConnell? And why did President George W. Bush reiterate to not skip any steps?
• How can speechwriters get “bogged down” when considering the audience? Why?
• According to Sarada Peri, how can social media “filter” speeches?
• Summarize the “helpful way” that Peri considered the audience when drafting a speech.

SET #1 - Second Clip: Best and Worst Settings [Clip #3] (8:33).

• According to John McConnell, what types of speech are considered “authentic” today? Does he agree or disagree, and why?
• Summarize the example McConnell provides from the town hall meeting in Kansas.
• What was President George W. Bush’s “secret weapon?”
• Describe President Barack Obama’s “reputation” as a speaker.
• Describe the new “opportunity” that the Obama administration had and summarize its impact. View President Obama’s appearance on Between Two Ferns (YouTube) and comment on its intent.
• How did President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney use humor in their speeches, according to McConnell?

SET #1 - Third Clip: The Correspondents' Dinner [Clip #4] (2:48).

• The last clip concluded with John McConnell describing the 2005 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner speech he helped write for Vice President Dick Cheney. Watch this excerpt of the speech (C-SPAN) [Clip #5; 3:16] and describe how Cheney used humor in the speech.
• How does preparation for the Correspondents’ Dinner speech “usually” go, according to Kyle O'Connor?
• According to Sarada Peri, in what other ways are jokes considered for the speech?
• Summarize the “famous story” that O’Connor describes and what it illustrates about “compartmentalizing.”
• Watch this excerpt of President Barack Obama’s 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech (C-SPAN) [Clip #6; 3:44] and describe how he used humor in the speech.

SET #2 - First Clip: Framework for Speeches [Clip #7] (9:47).

• Describe the role that President Barack Obama had in the speechwriting process, according to Sarada Peri.
• What’s one of the “challenges” for Presidents? Summarize the example Peri shares from the arrival of Pope Francis.
• According to John McConnell, what role did President George W. Bush have in the speechwriting process?
• What does McConnell mean when he says speechwriters should give the President “something to react to?”
• According to Kyle O'Connor, how could speechwriters determine if President Obama was “engaged” in the draft?”
• What role does “inevitability” have in speechwriting, according to Peri?

SET #2 - Second Clip: Foreign or Domestic [Clip #8] (5:31).

• How did John McConnell prepare for writing speeches when he was not an “expert” on the topic?
• What was the “signature issue” of George W. Bush’s presidency, and how did this impact the speechwriting process?
• According to Sarada Peri, what speechwriter staffing change was made during the presidency of Bill Clinton? Why?
• How are foreign policy speeches “a different ballgame?”
• Based on the clip, why was the “prose” of a foreign policy speech often impacted?
• Summarize the “piece of trivia” McConnell shares.

SET #2 - Third Clip: The Voice of the President [Clip #9] (2:44).

• According to Sarada Peri, why did President Barack Obama choose to sing “Amazing Grace” during his speech in the wake of the 2017 Charleston church shooting?
• View this excerpt of the end of President Obama’s speech at Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s funeral service in the aftermath of the 2017 Charleston church shooting (C-SPAN) [Clip #10; 3:48]. What do you see and hear?
• What is the “hardest part” of the beginning stage of being a speechwriter?
• How do speechwriters overcome the Presidential voice “hurdle,” according to Peri?

SET #3 - First Clip: The Draft Process [Clip #11] (4:12).

• According to John McConnell, how did the George W. Bush administration’s speechwriting staff handle comments?
• Why did President George W. Bush’s speechwriters “insist” on edits being returned on a “hard copy?”
• Who was “accountable” for each speech, and what did this mean regarding edits and comments?
• Based on the clip, what happens to every draft of every speech?
• How were edits received and conducted during the Obama administration, according to Sarada Peri?
• What practices did President Barack Obama’s speechwriters implement, based on the clip?

SET #3 - Second Clip: Influence and Challenge [Clip #12] (9:31).

• Does Sarada Peri think she had any “influence” over governmental policy? How did Peri “push the envelope?”
• What is “most rewarding” about writing for Presidents and Vice Presidents, and how does this inform the work of speechwriters?
• In what way was policy and speechwriting connected in the Bush administration, according to John McConnell?
• According to Kyle O'Connor, what is the other “point” of a Presidential speech?
• How did McConnell try to influence policy if there was something he felt strongly about?
• What do speech writers have to be “cognizant” about, according to Peri?

SET #3 - Third Clip: Practicing Presidents [Clip #13] (5:01).

• How were President George W. Bush’s speeches given to him, according to John McConnell?
• Why would McConnell ask to see the reading copy?
• Based on the clip, how often would President Bush practice his speeches beforehand? When would this occur?
• Compare President Bush and President Barack Obama’s use of a teleprompter, as stated in the clip.
• Which speeches did President Obama “rehearse?”
• How did First Lady Michelle Obama prepare for speeches, according to Sarada Peri? Why?
• Which speech did President Obama have to memorize, according to Kyle O'Connor? Why?

OPTIONAL SIMULATION

Your students have now learned about the role of Presidential speechwriters and the process of Presidential speechwriting, but it is now time for them to apply their learning.

Split your class into groups of three-four and direct each group to determine who will act as the President, with the remaining group members serving as the speechwriting team. Have each team review the steps listed in the chart in their graphic organizers. The steps are also listed below.

Tailor this portion of the lesson to fit your specific teaching context, including providing any additional clarifications, guidance, and/or supports. Suggested time limits are provided below.

• Step #1 : President - Consider a topic that is important to you. Direct your speechwriters to develop a 3-5 minute speech on the topic. You may continue to offer advice or thoughts throughout this early stage. Speechwriters - Using what the president describes, begin the process of preparing a speech, including by conducting research and developing an outline. The President may offer additional advice or thoughts throughout this early stage. 10 Minutes
• Step #2: President - While the schedule of the President is busy and subject to change, you want to speak about your topic at an upcoming event. Describe the event you want to speak at to your speechwriters. Speechwriters - Based on what the President says, consider who the audience at the speech will be, and make edits to the ongoing draft of your speech. 5 Minutes
• Step #3: President - You have other responsibilities during this time, but may manage to set aside some time with your speechwriters to emphasize what you want to sound like during your speech. Speechwriters - Think about what you know about the President, including how he or she speaks. Adjust the ongoing draft of your speech to closely match their tone, speed of speech, and preferences, etc. 10 Minutes
• Step #4: President - Receive the first draft from your speechwriters. Make as many or as few edits as you’d like. Also consider what your policy advisors may say and offer those suggestions too. Speechwriters - Determine which changes are necessary or not. Make final edits and submit the final draft to the President. The President may ask for several drafts until the speech is to his/her approval. 10 Minutes
• Step #5: President - Once you receive the final draft, make any final changes that you wish and deliver the speech to the class. Speechwriters - Take notes as the President delivers the speech, and consider what you would change if you could do the process again. 5 Minutes Per Speech

After your students are finished sharing their presentations from the application activity, direct them to complete the final culminating writing prompt in their graphic organizers, and have students share their responses, comparing their perspectives with their classmates' perspectives: Having now learned about the role of Presidential speechwriters and the process of Presidential speechwriting, describe whether or not you would want to be a Presidential speechwriter and why. Be sure to include evidence from the video clips in the lesson to support your response.

Related Articles

• FOR CLIP #3: President Barack Obama: Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis (YouTube)
• Speeches (George W. Bush Library)
• Speeches and Remarks (WhiteHouse.gov)

Additional Resources

• Video Clip: Barack Obama and the Press
• Bell Ringer: Presidential Speechwriting
• Bell Ringer: What Makes a Good Inaugural Address
• Bell Ringer: President George W Bush - Biography
• Lesson Plan: Eras of Presidential Speeches
• Lesson Plan: Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall Speech
• Lesson Plan: Analyzing Historical Presidential Inaugural Addresses
• Lesson Plan: Presidential Communication during Times of Crisis
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• Lesson Plan: The Presidency of George W. Bush
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How Obama’s Reading Shaped His Writing

"obama-the-writer came before obama-the-candidate.".

Josh Kalven loved walking through Hyde Park. Sometimes he explored the University of Chicago’s campus. Sometimes he headed straight to his job at 57th Street Books, a store that belonged to the neighborhood’s Seminary Co-op.

One day, in the spring of 1996, Kalven walked past a yard sign on Lake Park Avenue. It was odd that he noticed it; most people tune out bids for the state senate. It was even odder that he recognized the name. Where had he seen that name, Obama? Oh yeah , Kalven remembered, that guy’s a member at the bookstore .

Barack Obama first joined the Co-op in 1986, and for many years he would duck into 57th Street’s basement location, wearing a leather jacket in the winter and shirtsleeves rolled up in the summer, browsing quietly while the shop echoed with the sounds of the apartment dwellers above. Obama often came at night, just before closing, circling the new releases table in the front, studying the staff selections along the back, and usually leaving with a small stack of novels and nonfiction. At the counter, he would spell his name to get the member discount—a treasured and anonymous ritual unless your name was strange enough, and your visits frequent enough, that a clerk might start to remember you.

Obama’s anonymity ended for good in 2004, when he gave his famous keynote at the Democratic National Convention. In that speech, he shared his unique biography—the father from Kenya, the mother from Kansas—and underlined its themes of unity and hope. As Obama put it, “my story is part of the larger American story.”

Today, Obama’s story feels as simple and obvious as a Wikipedia page. Yet it took him years to process this story—to understand it, to interpret it, to create it. These were the years he spent writing (and failing to write) Dreams from My Father . “Writing a book,” he later said, “forced me to be honest about myself. . . . It was good training for the kind of politics I try to practice now.” Obama-the-writer came before Obama-the-candidate.

But Obama-the-reader came first.

Barack Obama was born in 1961, in Hawaii, and his early life was marked by displacement. His father left the island while Obama was still a baby; his mother moved him to Indonesia while he was still a child. At ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, and during each of these changes, changes he rarely controlled, Obama relied on books—starting with Dr. Seuss, graduating to Spiderman and science fiction, ending in high school with the novels of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. “I loved reading,” he later said. “The idea of having these worlds that were portable, that were yours, that you could enter into, was appealing to me.”

In 1979, Obama enrolled at Occidental College, a liberal arts school in Los Angeles. Like many of his era’s bookish undergrads, he encountered two approaches to literature: reading for empathy and reading for ideology. Another way to define this divide was reading like a novelist and reading like an English professor. Toni Morrison had offered a good example of the first approach only two years earlier, in an interview about her new novel Song of Solomon , which was also her first novel to feature men as major characters. Morrison described how hard she’d worked to enter the minds of those men—“to become that intimate with a character,” as she put it, “to try to feel what it was really like.”

This act of imagination—in creating characters and, just as much, in reading someone else’s characters, in entering their minds a second time and empathizing with their point of view—was becoming central to the teaching of creative writing. At Occidental, Obama sought out the literary crowd. “There was a strong circle of supportive but competitive writers,” recalled Tom Grauman, a classmate of Obama’s. “Basically, we all wanted to be in Paris between the wars.” Instead they found themselves in The Cooler, the campus’s cinderblock diner, where they talked earnestly about their reading and writing. Obama enrolled in a seminar where he workshopped his poetry; he submitted poems to Feast , the campus’s ambitious literary magazine. The whole time, Obama continued to read on his own. The book that shaped him the most, he later said, was Song of Solomon .

At The Cooler, Obama and his friends also talked about the intersection of literature and politics. He got more of this approach after transferring to Columbia University in 1981. While Obama had decided to major in political science, his English electives offered similar ideas: a lecture course with Edward Said that analyzed fiction through a postcolonial lens, a seminar with Lennard Davis that looked at the ideologies embedded in Dickens and Defoe. This second style of reading resonated with Obama, as well. “I recommend Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams,” he wrote to a friend during his senior year. “It generally has a pretty good aim at some Marxist applications of cultural study.”

And yet in the end Obama sided not with the English professors but with the novelists. Consider a passage from early in Dreams , where Obama chatted with two black classmates at Occidental, one of whom, Marcus, condemned the “racist tract” Obama was carrying, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Regina smiled and shook her head as we watched Marcus stride out the door. “Marcus is in one of his preaching moods, I see.”

I tossed the book into my backpack. “Actually, he’s right,” I said. “It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa’s the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infection.”

Regina blew on her coffee. “So why are you reading it?”

“Because it’s assigned.” I paused, not sure if I should go on. “And because—”

“Because . . .”

“And because the book teaches me things,” I said. “About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world. If you can keep your distance, it’s all there, in what’s said and what’s left unsaid. So I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”

Obama’s classmate, Marcus, was echoing Chinua Achebe, who a few years earlier had described Conrad and his book as “bloody racist.” At first Obama seemed to agree—or at least to try for some kind of consensus between the empathy and ideology sects. Ultimately, though, he chose to focus less on politics than on people. Obama read fiction because he wanted to experience psychological interiority—in Conrad’s readers, in Conrad’s characters, in Conrad himself.

After graduation, Obama felt torn between several possible futures, including one that was vaguely literary, in which he would try to write fiction, and one that was vaguely political, in which, drawing from a different strain of his reading, on the history of civil rights, he would try to make a difference.

By 1985, politics seemed to be winning. Obama had landed a job as a community organizer in Chicago, a job he worked hard at, building support for issues like asbestos removal. He also continued to read and write. Obama started browsing the new releases table at 57th Street Books. He started writing fiction of his own, eventually completing several stories he shared with his fellow organizers. “Take a look at this,” he said to one, a bit embarrassed, before handing over a draft about a storefront preacher. The stories showed promise, particularly in the relationships between their characters. “Write outside your own experience,” Obama urged another friend in a letter, though only after he urged him to cut back on the adverbs. “Write a story about your Grandmother in Armenia, or your sister in college; I find that this works the fictive imagination harder.”

After a few years of organizing, Obama headed to Harvard Law School. He wanted a more practical way to make a difference. In 1990, the Harvard Law Review elected Obama as its new president, making him the first African American to hold that spot. The choice was covered by the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune , among many other outlets, and each story hit the same Obama beats: his historic first, his unusual biography, and his political ambitions. “Down the road,” the Los Angeles Times noted, “he plans to run for public office.”

When Jane Dystel saw those stories, she decided to give Obama a call. Dystel was a fiery literary agent who’d spent a year in law school herself, and she promised Obama there was a book in all this buzz. Obama admitted that he’d thought about writing a novel, though never nonfiction, and he came to Manhattan to discuss it further. “We both said,” Dystel later recalled, “it should be a memoir.”

Literary memoir was thriving in the 1980s and early 1990s, inspired by new classics like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior . Kingston applied the novelist’s tools of character and empathy to her actual life. She tried to capture what it felt like to be a daughter, to be confused, to be simultaneously Chinese and American, and this kind of narrative was emerging as a vibrant presence in bookstores, literary journals, and creative writing workshops, where memoir taught as easily as minimalism.

Dystel helped Obama craft a proposal for the memoir they were calling Journeys in Black and White . Obama listed his literary models, including Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman, and Maxine Hong Kingston. But he was also detailing how much his reading had shaped his worldview. “Such works take on the narrative force of fiction,” he wrote in the proposal, “and invite the reader to share in the hopes, dreams, disappointments and triumphs of individual characters, thereby soliciting a sense of empathy and universality that is absent in too many works on race in America.”

In the fall of 1990, Obama’s proposal set off a bidding war, with a Simon & Schuster imprint winning for around $125,000. Obama’s contract called for an initial payment of $40,000, an outcome that thrilled him. He was twenty-nine years old, and for the first time in a while, his literary side seemed to have a shot at winning.

The writing proved difficult, which left the author eager for distraction. Obama had returned to Chicago, where he was spending more and more time with a lawyer he’d met named Michelle Robinson. To his publisher’s irritation, Obama had also agreed to run a voter registration drive—what was in many ways a campaign in miniature. “Do you want to write this memoir,” someone from the drive asked, “or rescue democracy?”

Obama, as usual, wanted to do both. While meeting with activists and voters, he carried a bag that held his handwritten drafts and the boxy laptop he used to type and revise them. When he finally submitted a chunk of the book, it was months late. The draft included some fine personal passages, but they were often drowned out by dense academic asides.

On October 3, 1992, Barack and Michelle were married. On October 20, Simon & Schuster cancelled the contract. He no longer had a publisher. (It was worse than that: he now owed Simon & Schuster forty thousand dollars.) But with Dystel’s encouragement, Obama began a second major draft. “The best story here,” one of his friends told him, “is you.”

That was also the hardest story. One of the things Obama loved about writing was the way it forced him to clarify what he thought and felt about something. In this case, though, that meant clarifying his fractured identity—and the anger he harbored at his white family and his absent black father.

Obama kept writing, and that meant he kept reading. One of the books he studied during this period was Kingston’s Woman Warrior , and it shows. Dreams was becoming a true literary memoir, built out of characters, epiphanies, and cinematic scenes. Obama was tough on himself. He was tough on his family, using his grandparents’ racial blind spots to demonstrate the realities white people often miss. Yet Obama also captured his grandparents’ complexity—their struggles and sacrifices and love.

By the spring of 1993, Obama had finished the new draft. Dystel called Henry Ferris, an editor at Times Books, and he agreed to look at a partial manuscript. It arrived by messenger service, an oversized box stuffed with hundreds of pages. “I was like, ‘What am I taking on here?’” Ferris recalled. “But before I was at the bottom of the first page, I was convinced I had to buy the book.”

Ferris gave Obama a flat $40,000, to pay off the Simon & Schuster debt, and the author continued to write and revise. Dreams finally appeared in August 1995. On pub day, Obama sent flowers to the Times Books offices. He was proud of his book. While it eventually dropped out of print, it got him some nice reviews and a modest book tour. One of the stops was 57th Street Books.

On the night of the reading, about thirty people showed up, most of them familiar faces from community organizing and the University of Chicago. As Obama introduced the book, he seemed slightly awkward, a little abstract. Once he started reading, though, he transformed. That night he gave a confident authorial performance, drawing out words, slipping into accents, and choosing the perfect pauses—a reminder that he mastered his style as a writer long before he mastered his style as an orator.

Politics beat literature—finally, decisively—a few weeks after the book tour ended, when Obama announced he was running for state senate. Over the next few years he rose from state senator to US senator to president. Dreams , back into print after his convention speech, came with him, combining with The Audacity of Hope to sell more than 6 million copies. Together, they make up the twenty-first century’s most successful campaign books.

And yet Dreams is more than that. Plenty of presidents have written books; a surprising number of them have even written good books. But outside of John Quincy Adams, who spent much of his political career wishing he’d become a great American poet instead, no other president has written a book that aspired to literature as clearly as Obama’s did.

Obama’s reading shaped these aspirations. While he’d told many people about his desire to run for office, including the journalists who’d covered him at the Harvard Law Review , Obama worked far too obsessively on Dreams and its revisions for it to be some sort of long-term political gambit. Dreams is not revealing because Obama wrote it before he had electoral ambitions. It’s revealing because he wrote it after he had them—because even then, he couldn’t help but write a book that was stubborn, poetic, confessional. Obama didn’t do this for money or future votes. He did it because books had always mattered to him and because he wanted to write something that measured up to the best books he’d read.

In the end, this process produced a surprising political benefit, a benefit even bigger than the millions of copies Dreams sold. Writing a book helped Obama see that his life was itself a story—that his character could be emphasized and adjusted, could be shaped to seem radical and angry (reading Heart of Darkness , seeing “demons” in white people) and yet, by the end of that very same chapter, could be shaped to seem unifying and hopeful (cataloguing the lessons he’d learned, including many “from my grandparents”). Dreams didn’t form just Obama. It formed his rhetorical style and his empathetic, consensus-driven politics.

As he put it in 1995, during one of the few interviews he did for his book, “My family is an example—and hopefully I am an example—of the possibility of arriving at some common ground.”

__________________________________

Adapted excerpt from Author in Chief by Craig Fehrman. Used with the permission of Avid Reader Press. Copyright © 2020 by Craig Fehrman.

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How Obama Writes His Speeches

U.S. Senator and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama works on his election night speech in his room at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago, IL.

Barack Obama is usually the candidate who begs his staff to let him take one more question at every event, but this week he hasn't been a man to linger. Even though his public schedule was relatively light, behind the scenes he was racing his own internal clock to finish what is the most important speech of his career.

Four years ago Obama spent months writing the convention speech that would catapult him onto the national stage. Even though he was busy with his day job in the Illinois State Senate and was running for the U.S. Senate, Obama would find time to scribble thoughts, often sneaking off the State Senate floor to the men's room to jot down ideas, or writing in the car as he campaigned across southern Illinois. It took him months to gather all those fleeting ideas and craft his acclaimed keynote speech.

This time around, Obama has been a tad busier and hasn't had the luxury of time. "The difference here is, you know, he's got a few other things going," Obama's top strategist David Axelrod told reporters Wednesday on Obama's flight into Denver. "It's hard to find the quality time to do this." The first draft wasn't finished until last week, and as of Wednesday his staff couldn't say how long the speech was running or when it might be finished. The looming deadline has led to a lot of late nights and bleary-eyed mornings for Obama, who instead of practicing delivery has been focused on the writing, even during his walk-through of Invesco Field Wednesday night.

The toughest aspect of writing a speech isn't so much the rhetoric, it's the ideas—which take time to incubate and develop, says Andrei Cherny, editor of the journal Democracy and a former White House speechwriter under Clinton. "The hardest part about writing a speech like this is not the mechanics of it but what you want to say and how you're going to say it, the strategy of it," Cherny says. For a speech of this magnitude it's not uncommon for politicians and their staffs to work on language for months, going into double-digit drafts, according to Cherny.

Obama takes an unusually hands-on approach to his speech writing, more so than most politicians. His best writing time comes late at night when he's all alone, scribbling on yellow legal pads. He then logs these thoughts into his laptop, editing as he goes along. This is how he wrote both of his two best selling books— Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope —staying up after Michelle and his two young daughters had long gone to bed, reveling in the late night quiet. For this speech Obama removed himself from the distractions at home and spent many nights in a room in the Park Hyatt Hotel in Chicago. These late-night sessions produced long, meandering texts that were then circulated to a close group of advisers, including Axelrod and Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau—a 27-year-old wunderkind wordsmith. "When you're working with Senator Obama the main player on a speech is Senator Obama," Axelrod said. "He is the best speechwriter in the group and he knows what he wants to say and he generally says it better than anybody else would."

The time constraint may have led Obama to sacrifice his famed rhetorical flourishes for cold, hard facts. He told reporters in Illinois earlier this week that he isn't aiming for the polished, soaring language that is his hallmark, but rather a more nuts and bolts dissection of the choice voters face. "This is going to be a more workmanlike speech. I'm not aiming for a lot of high rhetoric, I'm much more concerned with communicating how I intend to help middle-class families live their lives," Obama said. He also did his best to dampen expectations for a memorable address, telling reporters in Wisconsin, "I may not be as good as the other headliners the other three nights, but hopefully it'll make clear the choices the American people are going to face in November."

Obama knows well the power of a great speech. When his campaign came under fire before the Pennsylvania primary for controversial statements by Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama delivered a historic speech on race that changed the conversation and stemmed the attacks. This time around Obama needs to turn the conversation away from him—where it has lingered the last month, producing worrying poll numbers for the Democrats—and on to the issues. "This speech and this election is really not about Barack Obama it's about the American people," Axelrod said. "It's about the country, it about the direction that we have to go to get us out of the ditch we're in. He's going to spend the bulk of his time talking about that."

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Student Opinion

To Whom Would You Write an Open Letter?

A politician or a celebrity? A leader of a company? A school administrator? Your mom? Use our questions below to brainstorm ideas for our contest.

By Katherine Schulten and Natalie Proulx

What’s bothering you? Who could do something about it? What could you say that would persuade that person to care or to make change?

And what if we all read your letter? How could you make us care, too?

These are some of the questions we’re asking you to ponder for our new Open Letter Contest . An open letter is a published letter of protest or appeal usually addressed to an individual, group or institution but intended for the general public. Think of the many “Dear Taylor Swift” open letters you can find online and on social media: Sure, they’re written to Ms. Swift, but they’re really a way for the writer to share opinions and feelings on feminism, or ticket sales, or the music industry, or … the list goes on.

We’re inviting you to do this, too. Write your own open letter, to anyone you like on any issue you care about, as long as it is also appropriate and meaningful for a general New York Times audience.

To whom should you write? What should you say?

Take a look at a few examples that have been published in The Times over the years. (In The Times, open letters often appear in the Opinion section since they are persuasive essays written in the form of letters, as you’ll see.)

For instance, sometimes an open letter is intended to call someone out publicly, like this one written to Mark Zuckerberg , the chief executive of Facebook (now Meta), by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in 2019. Here is how it begins:

Mark, In 2010, I wrote “The Social Network” and I know you wish I hadn’t. You protested that the film was inaccurate and that Hollywood didn’t understand that some people build things just for the sake of building them. (We do understand that — we do it every day.) I didn’t push back on your public accusation that the movie was a lie because I’d had my say in the theaters, but you and I both know that the screenplay was vetted to within an inch of its life by a team of studio lawyers with one client and one goal: Don’t get sued by Mark Zuckerberg. It was hard not to feel the irony while I was reading excerpts from your recent speech at Georgetown University, in which you defended — on free speech grounds — Facebook’s practice of posting demonstrably false ads from political candidates. I admire your deep belief in free speech. I get a lot of use out of the First Amendment. Most important, it’s a bedrock of our democracy and it needs to be kept strong. But this can’t possibly be the outcome you and I want, to have crazy lies pumped into the water supply that corrupt the most important decisions we make together. Lies that have a very real and incredibly dangerous effect on our elections and our lives and our children’s lives.

But an open letter doesn’t have to be written by someone famous to someone famous. In An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China (student version; here is the original ), the journalist Michael Luo addresses an anonymous woman on the street. It begins:

Dear Madam: Maybe I should have let it go. Turned the other cheek. We had just gotten out of church, and I was with my family and some friends on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We were going to lunch, trying to see if there was room in the Korean restaurant down the street. You were in a rush. It was raining. Our stroller and a gaggle of Asians were in your way. But I was, honestly, stunned when you yelled at us from down the block, “Go back to China!”

Open letters can also honor and thank someone, and call attention to the continued importance of their work. In 2017, at the end of Barack Obama’s tenure as president, the rapper T.I. wrote him an open letter :

You entered humbly into our worlds from the streets of the South Side of Chicago and galvanized a generation. You resonated from the barbershops to the airwaves to the streets of every hood across America. Many of US did not know your name, nor did we truly understand the impact you would have on the world in the years, months and days that followed. As I reflect, I am filled with gratitude, outrage, grief, anger, humility and appreciation, both for the things you helped bring to light and the many things we still have yet to realize.

Or they can inspire and motivate, as the columnist Timothy Egan’s letter “ Dear Graduate ,” from 2009, does. Here’s an excerpt:

Eat a hot dog. With lots of mustard. The kind you can get for two dollars from street vendors just outside the ballpark, a trick I picked up from Ash Green, gentleman editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He passed this wisdom on before the recession. While we’re on the subject: Learn to cook, something they don’t teach at fancy-pants colleges. Millions for quantum physics and deconstructing Dostoevsky, nothing on how to make enchiladas for 20 people. At times, your life will have moments, days, even weeks of despair. Trust me: there is no bout of blues that a rich Bolognese sauce, filling every cubic inch of kitchen air, cannot cure. And that brings me to: Take risks. I don’t mean ski the double diamond runs, ask for a card in blackjack with 15 showing and the dealer holding a king, or hit a high note in a karaoke bar, while sober. That goes without saying.

Students, read the open letters above, and then tell us: To whom would you most like to write an open letter?

Here are some questions that can help you brainstorm which audience you might want to address:

Is there someone famous who has made you mad, or has intrigued or impressed you? Or someone to whom you’d like to offer your expertise, advice or opinion? Like a politician, an athlete, a leader of a corporation, an artist or an entertainer?

Is there a powerful person or institution that you’d like to call out publicly? Someone who you believe needs to be held accountable in some way? What have they done that you think others need to know about?

Is there a person or group you would like to inspire or motivate to take action? What is it that you want them to consider, reflect on or do?

Is there someone closer to home, like a parent, a friend, a teacher or a neighbor, you’d like to address? What would you say to this person that would be meaningful, important and appropriate for a general audience to hear?

Is there a person or group you would like to address because you want to honor or thank them or to reflect on their contribution to society, as T.I. did in his letter to Mr. Obama? What has this person or institution done, and what effect has it had on you and others? Why do you think it’s worth acknowledging publicly?

If no one person or group comes to mind, perhaps a cause or issue inspires you.

For a decade we ran an editorial contest , and the students who participated in it wrote passionately about all kinds of things: artificial intelligence , fast fashion , race , transgender rights , college admissions , parental incarceration , fan fiction , snow days , memes , being messy and so much more . You can still write about the issues and ideas that fire you up — but this time around you’ll be writing a letter to a person who has the power to bring change or understanding to that issue. Here are some questions that might help you brainstorm:

What causes or issues do you care about? Why are they important to you? What experiences do you have with them?

What would you like to see change? Why? How would that change be meaningful to you or to the communities you care about?

What do you wish more people understood? What is something you know a great deal about that you think others would benefit from understanding better?

Once you have a sense of your issue, ask yourself:

Who can make a change, big or small, local or global, to address this issue?

In the comments, tell us to whom you’d like to write an open letter, the reason you’re writing and why you think that issue is important not only for the recipient but also for a wider audience.

Then, if you’re so inspired, you can turn your comment into an open letter and submit it to our contest . Find out more about how to write your letter in our related guide .

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Katherine Schulten has been a Learning Network editor since 2006. Before that, she spent 19 years in New York City public schools as an English teacher, school-newspaper adviser and literacy coach. More about Katherine Schulten

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

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Cash-strapped Trump is now selling $60 Bibles, U.S. Constitution included

Rachel Treisman

Then-President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a controversial 2020 photo-op. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a controversial 2020 photo-op.

Former President Donald Trump is bringing together church and state in a gilded package for his latest venture, a $60 "God Bless The USA" Bible complete with copies of the nation's founding documents.

Trump announced the launch of the leather-bound, large-print, King James Bible in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday — a day after the social media company surged in its trading debut and two days after a New York appeals court extended his bond deadline to comply with a ruling in a civil fraud case and slashed the bond amount by 61%.

"Happy Holy Week! Let's Make America Pray Again," Trump wrote. "As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible."

Consider This from NPR

Why trump's persecution narrative resonates with christian supporters.

The Bible is inspired by "God Bless the USA," the patriotic Lee Greenwood anthem that has been a fixture at many a Trump rally (and has a long political history dating back to Ronald Reagan). It is the only Bible endorsed by Trump as well as Greenwood, according to its promotional website .

The Bible is only available online and sells for $59.99 (considerably more expensive than the traditional Bibles sold at major retailers, or those available for free at many churches and hotels). It includes Greenwood's handwritten chorus of its titular song as well as copies of historical documents including the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Pledge of Allegiance.

"Many of you have never read them and don't know the liberties and rights you have as Americans, and how you are being threatened to lose those rights," Trump said in a three-minute video advertisement.

"Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe that we need to bring them back and we have to bring them back fast."

'You gotta be tough': White evangelicals remain enthusiastic about Donald Trump

Trump critics on both sides of the aisle quickly criticized the product, characterizing it as self-serving and hypocritical.

Conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes slammed him for "commodifying the Bible during Holy Week," while Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota critiqued him for "literally taking a holy book and selling it, and putting it out there in order to make money for his campaign."

Trump says the money isn't going to his campaign, but more on that below.

Klobuchar added that Trump's public attacks on others are "not consistent with the teachings of the Bible," calling this "one more moment of hypocrisy." Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser for anti-Trump Republican PAC the Lincoln Project, called it "blasphemous ."

And former Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, trolled Trump with a social media post alluding to his alleged extramarital affairs.

"Happy Holy Week, Donald," she wrote. "Instead of selling Bibles, you should probably buy one. And read it, including Exodus 20:14 ."

Christianity is an increasingly prominent part of his campaign

Trump has made a point of cultivating Christian supporters since his 2016 presidential campaign and remains popular with white evangelicals despite his multiple divorces, insults toward marginalized groups and allegations of extramarital affairs and sexual assault.

And his narrative of being persecuted — including in the courts — appears to resonate with his many Christian supporters.

Trump has increasingly embraced Christian nationalist ideas in public. He promised a convention of religious broadcasters last month that he would use a second term to defend Christian values from the "radical left," swearing that "no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration."

He made similar comments in the Bible promotional video, in which he warned that "Christians are under siege" and the country is "going haywire" because it lost religion.

What to know about the debut of Trump's $399 golden, high-top sneakers

"We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us," he said. "We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and back into what will be again a great nation."

Trump himself is not known to be particularly religious or a regular churchgoer. He long identified as Presbyterian but announced in 2020 that he identified as nondenominational .

A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this month found that most people with positive views of Trump don't see him as especially religious, but think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like their own.

Trump said in the promotional video that he has many Bibles at home.

"It's my favorite book," he said, echoing a comment he's made in previous years. "It's a lot of people's favorite book."

The Impact Of Christian Nationalism On American Democracy

Trump's relationship to the Bible has been a point of discussion and sometimes controversy over the years.

In 2020, amid protests over George Floyd's murder, he posed with a Bible outside a Washington, D.C., church, for which he was widely criticized. U.S. Park Police and National Guard troops had tear-gassed peaceful protesters in the area beforehand, seemingly to make way for the photo-op, though a watchdog report the following year determined otherwise .

That same year, a clip of a 2015 Bloomberg interview, in which Trump declines to name his favorite — or any — Bible verse resurfaced on social media and went viral.

Bible sales are unlikely to solve Trump's financial problems

An FAQ section on the Bible website says no profits will go to Trump's reelection campaign.

"GodBlessTheUSABible.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign," it says.

However, the site adds that it uses Trump's name, likeness and image "under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC."

Trump is listed as the manager, president, secretary and treasurer of CIC Ventures LLC in a financial disclosure from last year.

Here's what happens if Trump can't pay his $454 million bond

Trump's sales pitch focuses on bringing religion back to America.

"I want to have a lot of people have it," he said at one point in the video. "You have to have it for your heart and for your soul."

But many are wondering whether Trump has something else to gain from Bible sales while facing under mounting financial pressure.

There's his presidential reelection campaign, which has raised only about half of what Biden's has so far this cycle. Trump acknowledged Monday that he "might" spend his own money on his campaign, something he hasn't done since 2016.

There's also his mounting legal expenses, as he faces four criminal indictments and numerous civil cases. Trump posted bond to support a $83.3 million jury award granted to writer E. Jean Carroll in a defamation case earlier this month, and was due to put up another $454 million in a civil fraud case this past Monday.

Trump is on the verge of a windfall of billions of dollars. Here are 3 things to know

His lawyers had said last week that they had approached 30 companies for help making bond, but doing so was a "practical impossibility" — prompting New York's attorney general to confirm that if Trump did not pay, she would move to seize his assets . On Monday, the appeals court reduced the bond amount to $175 million and gave Trump another 10 days to post it.

Trump has evidently been trying to raise money in other ways.

The day after the civil fraud judgment was announced, he debuted a line of $399 golden, high-top sneakers , which sold out in hours . The company behind his social media app, Truth Social, started trading on the Nasdaq exchange on Tuesday, which could deliver him a windfall of more than $3 billion — though he can't sell his shares for another six months.

• Donald J. Trump
• sales pitch
• Christianity

• facebook-rs

Obama to Protester Interrupting: ‘Can’t Just Talk and Not Listen’

• By Charisma Madarang

Charisma Madarang

Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton arrived at Radio City Music Hall in New York on Thursday night to garner support and funds for President Joe Biden ‘s reelection campaign. The event drummed up more than $25 million in what Biden’s campaign is calling the “most successful political fundraiser in American history.”

While moderator Stephen Colbert gathered with the trio in an armchair conversation, dubbing them “ champion talkers, ” the occasion was frequently interrupted by protestors inside the theater. Throughout different moments of the event, attendees would shout over the discussion, referencing Biden’s support of Israel in the Hamas war that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza .

At this point, Obama was interrupted by a protestor inside the theater. Speaking to the protestor, Obama said, “You can’t just talk and not listen.… That’s what the other side does.” He added, “It is possible for us to understand that it is possible to have moral clarity and have deeply held beliefs, but still recognize that the world is complicated and it is hard to solve these problems.”

Steve Vai and Tool's Danny Carey Unite With King Crimson Musicians for 'BEAT' Tour

Casey benjamin, ace multi-instrumentalist for robert glasper, a tribe called quest, dead at 45, trump launches another attack on judge's daughter, this time with photos, biden is building a ‘superstructure’ to stop trump from stealing the election.

. @POTUS @JoeBiden @BarackObama @BillClinton on stage at Radio City Music Hall. The fundraiser has been interrupted multiple times by protesters. Obama snapped at one of them: you can’t just talk, you have to listen. pic.twitter.com/qtcWJ2oqCy — Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) March 29, 2024

Earlier this month, as Biden prepared for his pivotal  2024 State of the Union , protestors demanding a ceasefire blockaded outside the White House and near the Capitol. “We are outraged, we are heartbroken, and we are demanding that President Biden stop funding and arming Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,” Elena Stein of Jewish Voice for Peace, which helped organize the protest, told  Rolling Stone.

Biden and his administration have urged Israel not to invade or launch a major offensive on Rafah at least until civilians have been allowed the opportunity to evacuate. Both Biden and  Vice President Kamala Harris  have  called for a temporary ceasefire  during the holy month of Ramadan, but Israel and Hamas have not reached an agreement in negotiations.

RFK Jr. Keeps Insisting Biden Is a Bigger Threat to Democracy Than Trump

• Perspective
• By Nikki McCann Ramirez

Jon Stewart Says Apple Wouldn’t Let Him Interview FTC Chair

• Tech Overreach

Republicans Want to Rename D.C.’s Most Annoying Airport After Trump

Netanyahu says 'unintentional' israeli airstrike killed aid workers in gaza.

• Israel-Hamas War

Trump Posts $175 Million Bond in NY Civil Fraud Case, Averts Asset Seizure

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The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

Remarks by President   Biden, President Obama, and President Clinton in a Moderated Conversation with Stephen Colbert at a Campaign Reception | New York,   NY

8:57 P.M. EDT

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Hey!  (Applause.) PRESIDENT BIDEN:  I think I should go home.  AUDIENCE:  Four more years!  Four more years!  Four more years! PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Four more years!  Four more years!  Four more years!   PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  (Applause.) MR. COLBERT:  Thank you.  Good evening, everybody.  I’m your moderator, Stephen Colbert, for what I’ll hope — (applause) — will be a lively conversation this evening between these three gentlemen.  Mr. Presidents, thank you so much for joining me this evening.  (Applause.) PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Good to see you.  MR. COLBERT:  This is an — such an exciting and rare occasion: Three presidents have all come to New York and not one of them is here to appear in court.  (Laughter and applause.)  Now, before we begin, just a few ground rules, gentlemen.  You are all very intelligent men who have at one time or another been the most powerful person in the world.  And on top of that, you are all, shall we say, champion talkers.  (Laughter.)  We have limited time together here, so I’m going to hold you two gentleman — President Obama, President Clinton — I’m going to hold you to five-minute answers.  (Laughter.)  There will be an audio cue to let you know when to stop talking.  It’ll sound like this: Please stop talking.  (Laughter.)  President Biden, because you are the sitting president and — (applause) — you get seven minutes, because as the sitting president, you can order SEAL Team Six to take me out — (laughter) — which, according to Donald Trump’s lawyers, is perfectly okay to do.  (Laughter.)  Every election cycle, we’re told that this election is the most important election in our lives.  And here we are in 2024, and this election really feels like the most important election of our lives when it comes to rights and freedoms and the heart and the soul and the future of our country.  (Applause.)   First question for you, President Biden.  How would you describe what’s at stake in this election? PRESIDENT BIDEN:  I think our democracy is at stake.  Not a joke.  I think democracy is literally at stake.  (Applause.) Look, I wasn’t going to run in 2020, because I just lost my son Beau a little earlier and — until I watched what happened down in — in Virginia when those folks came out of the fields carrying torches and — and Nazi flags and accompanied by white supremacists.  And a young woman was killed — a bystander.  And when the President was a- — former President was asked what he thought of that, he said, “There are very fine people on both sides.” 

Think of the things he said.  Think of the things he’s done; the things he says he wants to do — he’s indicated that he really wants to have the first day of his new term — quote, unquote — will be one where he engages in absolute autonomy that he can do whatever he wants to do; the way he talks about people; the way he characterizes people.  I think — I think a lots at stake, but I’m really hopeful.  Because I think we get by this election — not because of me, but we get by this election — we’re in a position where we can set the course for the next four or five, six decades in a way that can make us much, much better.  (Applause.)  I really mean it.  And, again, not because of me.  We’re at a real inflection point in history, because things are changing. This guy denies there’s global warming.  This guy wants to get rid of not only Roe v. Wade, but he — which he brags about having done, he wants to get rid of the ability of anyone anywhere in America to ever choose.  I mean, all the things he’s doing are so old — speaking of old.  (Laughter and applause.)  And, you know, he — a little old and out of shape.  But anyway.  (Laughter.) MR. COLBERT:  President Obama and President Clinton, is there anything you — you’d like to add to that sense of urgency? PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Well, I — I think it’s worth adding that — (applause) — it — it’s not just the negative case against the presumptive nominee on the other side; it’s the positive case for somebody who’s done an outstanding job in the presidency.  (Applause.)   Well, it — it’s — sometimes we — we forget where we started and where we are now.  You’ve got record-breaking job growth.  You’ve got an unemployment rate — (applause) — that is as low as it has been — for African Americans, by the way, the lowest on record ever.  (Applause.)  You’ve got extraordinary progress building off the work we did — first, Bill Clinton passing the Children’s Health Insurance Act, we passed the Affordable Care Act.  (Applause.)  Joe Biden takes the baton.  He’s now expanded coverage; made sure that seniors are seeing big discounts in their prescription drugs, capping — (applause) — insulin drug prices — capping the price of insulin at 35 bucks, where it used to cost them up to $400 — (applause); you know, helping young people go to college — (applause); the record-setting investment in clean energy that’s going to transition us to the kind of future that our children and grandchildren deserve.  (Applause.) So — and we could obviously go on.  The point is — am I at five minutes yet?  (Laughter.)  MR. COLBERT:  You have thirty seconds. PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Keep going.  You’re sounding good.  (Laughter.) 

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  The President of the United States says I can go longer.  (Laughter.)  But the point I’m — MR. COLBERT:  You cede some of your time to this gentleman?  (Laughter.) PRESIDENT OBAMA:  The — the point is, you know, that — look, passions get stirred by what we’re against.  And Joe is absolutely right that we’ve got not just a nominee but, frankly, a party and an entire infrastructure that increasingly seems unconcerned with the essence of America — right? — the idea of self-governance — (applause) — and the possibilities of us all cooperating and bridging our differences and moving forward. But we also have a positive story to tell about the future.  And that is something that Joe Biden has worked on diligently each and every day on behalf of working Americans, and I expect him to continue to do that for the next four years and eight months.  (Applause.) PRESIDENT CLINTON:  He’s really done a good job.  (Laughter and applause.)  And I think the way you opened this — we talked about the defense to democracy — begs not only support for President Biden but also begs the question of why are we even arguing about some of this stuff? 

I’ll tell you what’s old.  What’s old is the United States of America.  We are the longest-lasting, free democracy in the history of the world.  (Applause.)  And one of our — one of our Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower, said he worried whether when times got tough and arguments got hot, Americans would be strong enough to preserve their democracy.  (Applause.)  And we have to realize that in order to do that, no one is going to be right all the time.  A broken clock is right twice a day.  (Laughter.)  And the rest of us are compelled to spend our freeing lives going back and forth between trying to be right all the time and at least trying to be — do better than being right twice a day.  Into that mess that President Biden inherited was a very vibrant, diverse society and economy.  And, you know, President Trump — let’s be honest — had pretty good couple of years because he stole them from Barack Obama.  (Laughter.)  I mean — I mean — (applause) — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  That’s true. PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Thank you.  Thank you. PRESIDENT CLINTON:  But look — PRESIDENT OBAMA:  The Obama-Biden economy for those first two years.  But, please, continue. PRESIDENT CLINTON:  But look — PRESIDENT OBAMA:  I’m going to give him an extra minute.  (Laughter.) PRESIDENT CLINTON:  No, it’s true.  I listened — I listened to him tell us how terrible the American economy was all during 2016.  And then, by January of 2017, after the inauguration, it had become wonderful — (laughter) — miraculously, overnight.  (Laughter.) Well, what happened was, actually, job growth under President Trump was slower than it was under President Obama in his last term.  (Applause.)  But people didn’t feel it.  It takes a while to feel it.  So, then he claimed credit for everything.  Then, all of a sudden, Joe Biden comes along and creates roughly twice as many jobs in three years as he did.  (Applause.)  And so, I believe in keeping score.  (Laughter.)  And not in a vindictive way but in a positive way.  He’s been good for America, and he deserves another term.  And democracy around the world needs him.  (Applause.)

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Thank you. MR. COLBERT:  Mr. President, I want to point out that we are 10 minutes in and I have asked one question.  (Laughter.)  So, I’m going to do a quick lightning round here.  We’re going to get back to some policy, some ideas here.  But a quick lightning round here.  Do any of you have plans to sell golden sneakers or $60 Bibles?  (Laughter.)  Show of hands.  Show of hands.  We’ll do this debate.  No?  Okay, no.  All right.  PRESIDENT BIDEN:  No golden sneakers. MR. COLBERT:  Yes.  (Laughter.)  President Obama and President Clinton, what do you miss about being president?  Is it nice to live in the White House, or do you always feel like you’re in a museum?  For you also, President Biden, is it a nice place to live?  I know it’s pretty, but do you always feel like you’re, you know, walking around the corner — PRESIDENT CLINTON:  N- — MR. COLBERT:  — and there will be a gift shop?  (Laughter.) PRESIDENT CLINTON:  I loved — I loved living there.  I mean — and the last time I walked in, the day before I left, I landed on Air F- — the Marine One helicopter and I walked in, I was just as idealistic and hopeful about America as the day I showed up.  But I support the two-term limit.  I believe that no one should serve forever in a democracy.  And — but I do miss, on occasion, especially when I think President Biden’s getting the raw deal — I think, “Boy, I wish I were there to push back.”  Because I think — (applause) — because I think he’s done a good job and because I think democracy is on the line all around the world.  It’s — it’s not surprising that freedom and democracy are being questioned.  There are no such things as permanent victories in politics.  But I do believe — AUDIENCE MEMBER:  (Inaudible.) PRESIDENT CLINTON:  — that’s good. MR. COLBERT:  For people watching at home — PRESIDENT CLINTON:  You want to say anything? MR. COLBERT:  Excuse me.  Excuse me, Mr. Presidents.  AUDIENCE MEMBER:  (Inaudible.) MR. COLBERT:  For people who are watching — who are watching at home on the feed, you may not be able to hear that there’s some protesters here who — AUDIENCE MEMBER:  (Inaudible.) MR. COLBERT:  Hold on a second here. 

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  (Inaudible.)

MR. COLBERT:  There’s some protesters here who are no doubt related to the protests we saw across the street.  Everyone in here saw the protests across the street before we came in.  And this is a subject I was going to get to later, but as long as this — it’s been brought up here, Mr. — Mr. Biden, I wanted to ask you this question. 

As the leader of the United States and as a leader of the alliance of democratic nations, and also aware of the moral leadership that the United States provides to the entire world, there are people outside and people in this room, I’m sure, who have passionate divisions about what they think the best course of action is for the crisis in Israel and Gaza right now. 

What do you believe the United States’ role should be going forward to ensure the most peaceful and prosperous future for the people of Israel and for Gaza — these two people, who the world sees and for whom the world’s heart breaks? PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, both these gen- — AUDIENCE MEMBERS:  (Inaudible.) PRESIDENT BIDEN:  That’s all right.  Let them go.  Let them go.  Look, there’s a lot of people who are very, very con- — there are too many innocent victims, Israeli and Palestinians.  We’ve got to get more food and medicine and supplies in to the Palestinians.  We’re working like hell to do that.  (Applause.)  We’ve got to open more opportunities.  But you can’t forget that Israel is in a position where its very existence is at stake.  You have — you have all those people — (applause) — 1,200 people.  Now, they weren’t — they weren’t killed; they were massacred.  They were massacred.  And imagine if that had happened in the United States.  And the — tying a mom and her daughter together, pouring kerosene on them, burning her to death.  There’s — it’s understandable Israel has such a profound anger.  And Hamas is still there.  But we must, in fact, stop the effort to — that is resulting in significant deaths of innocent civilians and, particularly, children.  And — (applause) — and we can. And I won’t — I won’t go into detail now.  But look, I’ve been working with the Saudis and with all the other Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan and Qatar.  They are prepared to fully recognize Israel — fully recognize Israel, first time.  (Applause.)  But we have to — there has to be a post — a post-Gaza plan here, and there has to be a train to a two-state solution.  Doesn’t have to occur today, but it has to be a — a progression.  (Applause.)  And I think we can do that.  I think we can do that.  And that’s why we’re seeing more avenues open into Israel — excuse me, into Gaza to bring food and medicine.  And there’s much more we can do.  But I’m confident it can be done and Israel’s in- — integrity, Israel security, Israel’s — Israel nationally can be preserved.  (Applause.) We can do this.  (Applause.)  PRESIDENT OBAMA:  You sa- — you asked earlier about being in the White House.  (Laughter.)  No, no, no.  You know, you’ll — you’ll see there’s some relevance here.  (Laughter.)  It is a lonely seat.  I mean, one of the things I miss is the incredible team that you have around you.  You have some of the smartest, most dedicated, selfless people who are every day sacrificing — (applause) — you know, their families are sacrificing.  They are putting heroic, Herculean efforts into just trying to make the world a little better — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  And every time you show up at the White House, they all come and thank you.  PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Well, they — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  No, no, no, no, no.  I’m not joking.  The — the affection for you is overwhelming.  PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Well, I appreciate that.  But — (applause) — but here’s the thing.  So — so, you have this incredible, you know, team.  And — and I think Bill and I — we’ve talked about it — that’s one of the things you miss most.  But although it’s a team, you’re still ultimately the person who has to make the calls.  And one of the realities of the presidency is that the world has a lot of joy and beauty, but it also has a lot of tragedy and cruelty.  And — and there’s history there.  And you — you don’t start from scratch.  And you don’t have neat, easy answers to really hard problems. 

And I think people, understandably, oftentimes want to — to feel a certain, you know, purity in terms of how those decisions are made.  But a president doesn’t have that luxury.  And so, when you look at a situation like we’re seeing in — in Gaza and in Israel, and your heart breaks initially for a massacre of unbelievable cruelty, it is also possible for us to say we unequivocally support the people of Israel and their ability to live and raise families and so forth, which is what Joe’s position has been and my position was and Bill Clinton’s position was — (applause) — and every American president, and it is also possible for us to have our hearts broken watching innocent people being killed — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  That’s right. PRESIDENT OBAMA:  — and trying to manage through that in a way that ultimately leads to both people being able to live in peace, side by side.  (Applause.)  But — but that is not an easy task.  And so, the — the reason I think I — I — the reason —

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  A- — no, listen — and it’s imp- — but here’s the thing: You can’t just talk and not listen — (applause) — because that’s part of democracy.  Part of democracy is not just talking; it’s listening.  (Applause.)  That’s what the other side does.  (Applause.) And — and it is important for us to understand that it is possible to have moral clarity and — and have deeply held beliefs but still recognize that the world is complicated and it is hard to solve these problems.  (Applause.) And the thing — the thing that — the reason why I originally selected Joe Biden to be my vice president, the reason that I think he was one of the best vice presidents we’ve ever had, and the reason why I think he has been an outstanding president is because he has moral conviction and clarity, but he also is willing to acknowledge that the world is complicated and that he’s willing to listen to all sides in this debate and every other debate and try to see if we can find common ground.  That’s the kind of president I want.  (Applause.) I don’t want a president who thinks he’s got the right answer every single time and is not — not only not willing to listen the other side but demonizing the other side.  And we should value that decency in Joe Biden.  That’s one of the reasons I’m going to be working hard for him.  (Applause.) PRESIDENT CLINTON:  I know there are many other things we need to talk about tonight, but I believe that this is one of the most important reasons to reelect President Biden.  (Applause.)  And I’ll explain why.  Because he genuinely cares about preserving the existence of Israel, which Hamas doesn’t.  (Applause.)  And he genuinely cares about giving the Palestinians a decent state, self-governance, and the support they need for self-determination.  (Applause.)  And you’ve got to do both.  Look, this — the world we live in is hard, because you have to keep two apparently conflicting ideas in your head at the same time.  But don’t forget, those of you who — particularly if you’re younger and all you know is Israelis’ government is denying the rights of the Palestinians.  Perhaps my closest friend among other world leaders was Yitzhak Rabin — (applause) — who got himself killed standing for a Palestinian state.  (Applause.) And so, when Joe Biden says he wants a two-state solution, we all lived through the same things.  He’s not making this up.  We lived this.  And you should trust him to work for it, to work to ease the suffering of the totally innocent Palestinian citizens and not to allow Israel’s security to be lost over a bitter difference between the legitimacy of the Palestinians to statehood, which we agree with — all three of us.  So –(applause). MR. COLBERT:  President Biden, three weeks ago, you gave an energetic State of the Union Address.  (Applause.)  Yes.

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  It was energetic.  MR. COLBERT:  And for almost 8,000 words, you never said your predecessor’s name.  (Laughter and applause.)  And a lot of people out there complained that there’s “Trumpnesia,” people don’t remember what it was like when he was president.  And I — I remember what it was like.  I remember, particularly, how it came to its apotheosis on that terrible day on January 6th.  I remember my feelings that day.  But I have never heard you talk about what was going through your mind that day.  What were you thinking when you saw that unfold? PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Look, we had no president on January the 6th.  (Laughter and applause.)  No, no, no.  No, I’m not being a wise guy.  There was an insurrection happening.  AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Shame on you, Joe Biden! PRESIDENT BIDEN:  And here’s what happened.  AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Shame on you! PRESIDENT BIDEN:  I was supposed to make a speech on the economy. AUDIENCE MEMBER:  (Inaudible.) PRESIDENT BIDEN:  And I decided I couldn’t remain silent.  So, what I did was I made a speech about January the 6th — what was happening.  And I said there was an insurrection underway and it must be dealt with.  And I pled with the President to stop and do his job, call these people off.  He sat there in the dining room off the Oval Office for several hours and watched.  Didn’t do a damn thing.  And that’s why I felt obliged — even though I wasn’t sworn in yet; I was president-elect — that I went out and said, “This is what we should be doing,” and laid it out. And here’s what’s happened since then.  (Applause.)  What’s happened since then — it’s not only is — he said it wasn’t an insurrection.  He says that what was happening was totally legitimate, that these people were patriots.  He’s calling them “patriots.”  You notice he starts off all his rallies with them singing from prison and him interjecting with the sta- — with the — I think it’s the of Pledge of Allegiance or whatever.  I’m not sure exactly what he does with it.  But the end result of it is that he says he wants to free — if he’s reelected, he’s going to pardon all of them — pardon them.  What — what is — and, look — AUDIENCE:  Booo — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  No, no — no — and, by the way, he means it.  He means it.  And here’s what’s going to happen.  You know, whe- — we went up on Inauguration Day, and these guys were there — on Inauguration Day, you walk through the corridors — broken glass, smattered statues, the — the actual — the actual place we get sworn in was — was a mess because these guys had rampage- — ram- — rampaged through it.  And — and, look, I’ll g- — one real quick story.  First time I went to the G7 meeting — that’s the meeting of the European heads of state and — as president and — end — end of January.  And I sat down and I said, “America is back.”  And the French leader looked at me, and he said, “For how long?”  (Laughter.)  It wasn’t humorous.  He said for — he was serious. “For how long?” And then the German Chancellor looked at me.  He said, “What would you think, Mr. President, if, in fact, you picked up the paper tomorrow and found out here in Great Britain, on the London Times, the headline says, ‘Mob storms Parliament, breaks down the door of the House of Commons to protest the election and two bobbies were killed.’  What would you think back in America?”  And think about that.  What would you think if another democracy — and not just a leading democracy in the world but another democracy — went through this thing?  What would happen if — what would you say?  And the rest of the world looks to us. Look, we are the essential nation.  And that’s not pounding our chest.  Everybody in the world looks to us.  Imagine what would happen — Madeleine Albright, your Secretary of State, was right when she talked about “we are the essential nation.”  And we have to lead.  And when we look like we’re countenancing this — this unruly — and, like, saying, “You know, I’m going to — I’m going to be a dictator on the first day.”  He’s not joking.  And he’s serious about it.  And it — and it really shakes the entire foundation of the world, in terms of what’s going on.  So, that’s why we have to — and, lastly, when did you think you’d ever have a president of the United States whose people he talked about — he sends — talks about love letters with the North Korean dictator.  He talks about his closeness with Putin and what — and Kim Jong — I mean, this is a guy who has a perverse view of the world in terms of — (applause) — no, I — I mean it.  Anyway — MR. COLBERT:  Presidents Obama and Clinton, you know, you both know how this office works, obviously, and the extent of power and the — and the pitfalls of power.  When Donald Trump was president, what kept you up at night?  And before — and before you answer, while I’m flattered, you can’t both say my show.  (Laughter.)  I get it, and I’m flattered.  And thank you.  (Laughter.) What kept you up at night about that presidency? PRESIDENT OBAMA:  I want to emphasize the point Joe just made about how deeply that four-year stretch affected views of America around the world.  America is imperfect.  We have not always abided by our founding documents.  We — a civil war and enormous struggles were fought to try to perfect our Union.  And we, in our actions overseas, sometimes did not live up to our ideals.  But what has always made America exceptional is this radical idea that you can get people from every corner of the globe — don’t look alike, don’t have the same name, worship differently, speak different languages, have different cultural traditions — and somehow they’re going to come together under a set of rules and we’re all going to pledge th- — that’s our creed: that — (applause) — that we can live together, self-governing, have a representative government, peacefully transfer power.  And that ideal matters.  (Applause.)  It matters to our children and their grandchildren, but it also matters around the world.  When we see a — a deemphasis, when — when America is not forthright in speaking on behalf of those ideals, you see backsliding around the world.  You see authoritarians emboldened around the world.  You see aggression around the world because there’s no check.  And when we’re living up to those ideals, even in difficult times, things feel a little bit better, not just here but elsewhere — people are a little bit more hopeful.  So, what would keep me u- — up during those four years was: How badly are those ideals tarnished? The good news is — is that people still want to believe in those ideals.  They want to believe in human rights.  They want to believe in — (applause) — freedom of speech and religion.  And — and they want to believe in the idea that all people are equal.  Women are equal and have — (applause) — the right to control their bodies and, you know, shouldn’t be subject to domestic violence.  (Applause.)  And girls should be able to go to school just like everybody else.  And people of different sexual orientations should have the same rights and protections.  (Applause.) And religious minorities and ethnic minorities and racial minorities all deserve the same respect and are afforded the same dignity as everybody else.  (Applause.) Th- — those — those ideas, they can — they can ebb and flow depending on what happens in the White House. And the good news is is that we had a period of time where those ideals were not just de-emphasized but were violated, and then we have somebody come back in who says, “No, no, that’s — we do believe in the — this is what America is about.”  (Applause.)  And that’s the same test that we’re going to be undergoing over the next eight months: Do we, in fact, believe in those basic ideals?  And if we do, not only are we going to be okay, but the world is going to be okay.  (Applause.) PRESIDENT BIDEN:  You know, one of the things Barack — think about this.  This is not hyperbole.  We are the most unique nation in the world in this sense.  Every other nation was founded based on geography, ethnicity, religion.  None of — that’s not us.  We’re j- — we came about as a consequence of an idea — an idea.  (Applause.)  No, I’m serious.  Think about it.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their Crea- — we — that’s what found — that’s wh- — the basis of our existence.  That’s what fou- — that’s why we’re found.  We didn’t — we haven’t always lived up to it, but we’ve never fully walked away from it — until now, someone is contemplating walking away from it completely.  Our diversity is our strength.  It’s the reason why the rest of the world looks to us.  (Applause.) PRESIDENT CLINTON:  But — but this is the big reason you should win.  (Laughter.)  And that is that everything you said is true, but it only works if we all live under the same set of rules, we all have an equal set of chances to make it, and we treat each other with respect.  (Applause.)  We fight our differences.  We have our arguments.  And I’ll never forget a prominent member of the other party on the right once looked at my chief of staff and said, “You and the President actually think we should all live under the same set of rules, don’t you?”  (Laughter.)  He said, “Yeah, that’s what we thought being an American was all about it.”  He said, “Well, we don’t believe that.  We think we should first do what’s best for our party, then argue about the rest.”  That’s what’s at the heart of this.  Joe Biden has bent over backwards to reach out to members of the other party to negotiate in good faith to solve problems, including on the border.  (Applause.)  And — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  And they did. PRESIDENT CLINTON:  And in the case of the border, his apparent opponent basically said, “Hey,” to his own party, “you can’t do that.  Get off of that bill.  We need a problem, not a solution, at the border.”  (Applause.)  Well — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  That’s a fact. PRESIDENT CLINTON:  — you know, I think life has plenty of problems.  (Laughter.)  You know, your kids can get sick — PRESIDENT OBAMA:  You don’t have to manufacture them. PRESIDENT CLINTON:  Yeah.  Yeah, you — we don’t have to make them up.  And — but the problem is, they’re good at branding and blaming and we don’t like their solution so much.  He’s good at finding solutions people are actually glad they embraced.  And that’s why he should win.  (Applause.) MR. COLBERT:  We are — we are running short on time.  And I know you’re all busy men.  You’ve got to go run the world.  (Laughter.)  Here’s an important question.  All three of you have been on Air Force One.  You still have the keys, Mr. Biden.  That’s made by Boeing, right?  (Laughter.)  Do those doors stay on?  Before you get on, do you send on Pete Buttigieg with a socket wrench set to tighten them — tighten the bolts?  (Laughter.) PRESIDENT BIDEN:  I don’t sit by the door.  (Laughter and applause.) Obviously, I’m only kidding.  And I shouldn’t even joke about it.  I shouldn’t even joke. MR. COLBERT:  A fine American company. PRESIDENT BIDEN:  And, by the way, the one thing I can tell you about Air Force One: We’re not changing the color.  (Applause.)  Oh, he tri- — MR. COLBERT:  We have s- — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Trump wanted to change the color. PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Yeah, we’re not doing that.  (Laughter.) MR. COLBERT:  Since the State of the — sir, did you want to (inaudible) — PRESIDENT OBAMA:  No, no, no.  I have nothing — MR. COLBERT:  Since the State of the Union, President Biden, you’ve been busy.  You’ve been in Raleigh, Saginaw, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Vegas, Hotlanta, the Philly suburbs, Manchester, Dallas, and Houston.  (Applause.)  Donald Trump, as far as we can tell, has just been trying to win a third championship at his own golf course.  (Laughter.)  My question to you, sir: Can voters trust a presidential candidate who has not won a single Trump International Golf Club trophy?  At long last, sir, have you no chip shot?  (Laughter.) PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, look, I’d be happy to play.  I told him this before, when he came into the Oval when he was being — before he got sworn in.  I said, “I’ll give you three strokes if you carry your own bag.”  (Laughter and applause.) And I’ve only played 21 holes since I’ve been President.  (Laughter and applause.)

MR. COLBERT:  President Obama, I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time with you and your wife.  She has repeatedly asked me to call her Michelle — (applause) — which I — I now do.  I say, “Hello, Michelle.” 

I continue to call you, “Mr. President” — (laughter) — because you have never invited me to call you anything else.  (Laughter.)  So, my question is, to Presidents Biden and Clinton, don’t you think, at this point, I should be able to call him “Barack?”  Because it’s weird.  I went to your house, and I said, “Hello, Michelle.  Hello, Mr. President.”  (Laughter.)  I’m not asking for “Barry.”  (Laughter.)  Come on. 

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  No.  (Laughter.)

MR. COLBERT:  Doesn’t that feel weird?  (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Nope.  (Laughter and applause.)  Your — your wife can.  I like her.  (Laughter and applause.)  She’s here tonight.  Lovely. 

MR. COLBERT:  She’s —

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  That’s the only reason you might get another invitation.  (Laughter and applause.)

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  By the way, every time —

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Next — next question.  Move on.

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  I told these guys, for the first two years — for real — every time I’d be introduced, they play “Hail to the Chief,” I’d turn around — “Where the hell are they?”  (Laughter.)  “Where” —

MR. COLBERT:  You were this man’s vice president for eight very exciting years.  (Applause.)  What — on your first day in the Oval Office as the president, did you learn anything and immediately you went, “He could have told me about this”?  (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, I learned that what the president — I’d always kid the president.  I’d get to be the last person to speak with him, give him my advice.  And I’d — he’d thank me, and I’d walk out knowing he has to make the decision.  That’s — that’s the big difference. 

And as Harry Truman said, “You’re president.  If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”  (Laughter.)  I got one, and he bit a Secret Service agent, so I don’t know.  (Laughter and applause.) MR. COLBERT:  Before we go, President Biden, there have been a lot of jokes about your age.  And I’ve done a lot of them.  And — (laughter) — and they’ve been very successful.  Thank you — (laughter) — for that.  What would you like to say to the people who think that you’re too seasoned for the job? PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Well, I don’t know about seasoned, but I hope they — they’re not too old — they’re old ideas.  You know, this last guy that I ran against and running again- — again this time is — his ideas are from the 18th, 19th century.  (Laughter and applause.) 

No, I mean — I’m serious.  He talk- — the way he talks about what he — the way he says he going to suspend the Constitution, all the things he says. 

But, look, I think that there is, if you pay attention — if you’ve been around a while, no matter what your background is — if you pay attention, you know, the one thing age does bring is a little bit of wisdom.  And — (applause) — and I ho- —

Now, I know I don’t look much over 40.  I know that.  (Laughter.)  But all kidding aside, I think that one of the advantages that I’ve had: I got to work for and with both of these men.  I got to serve in the Senate a long time, and I got to know the place. 

And I think at least — like, for example, when we got elected, everybody told me we couldn’t do any of the things we got done — literally anything.  We couldn’t get the — (applause) — we — we couldn’t get anything done.  We couldn’t get the CHIPS Act.  We couldn’t get the veterans b- — all these things we were told we couldn’t get done. 

But there are still enough people in the Republican Party — this is not your father’s Republican Party.  This is a different breed of cat.  This is the — the — about 30 to 40 percent are the MAGA Republicans.  And I don’t know what — the thing that disturbs me most is I don’t know what it is that a — that — that my predecessor has on these guys, why they — why they’re not stepping up more like Liz Cheney and others.  (Applause.)  Because I know — I know that they don’t like a lot of what’s going on. 

And, for example, these guys are not going to vote again- — they don’t want to vote against raising the age of Social Security.  They don’t want to cut Social Security benefits.  They don’t want to end the whole — they — they don’t like the idea what’s happened in Roe v. Wade.

By the way, you elect me, we’re going to restore Roe v. Wade.  (Applause.)  Anyway —

I see those three zeros on that clock.  So, I’m going to hush up —

MR. COLBERT:  Yes, we are ju- —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  — as my mother would say.

MR. COLBERT:  — we are just out about time here.  But before we go, I wanted to talk to you, President Clinton, for just a moment.  You oversaw a rapidly growing economy in the 1990s.  And you — (applause) — oversaw a huge increase in our economy. 

What do you think people need to know, who might be watching — the voters out there, who may not yet see or feel in their pocket the growth of the Biden economy? PRESIDENT CLINTON:  Well, I think, first of all, there’s two things we’ve been through since I left the White House that changed the rules for everybody. 

One was the financial crash of 2008, which marred and limited what President Obama could accomplish early and required him to invest a lot of government money to try to jumpstart the economy in a program that he put President Biden, then vice president, in charge of running, and he did a heck of a good job.

Now — (applause) — and we had good recovery, but we were — they were criticized for the deficit spending.  But the truth is, when interest rates are zero or negative, you have to invest money, and only the government can do it.  And there was a $3 trillion hole in the economy that they spent $800 billion starting to fill.  It worked great. 

But by the end of President Obama’s eight years, we had a roaring economy, but people didn’t feel it yet.  It normally takes two or three years of real changes before people knew it. 

So, when Donald Trump got elected by telling everybody how terrible it was, all of a sudden, the day after he was elected, he said how great it was.  (Laughs.)  And it was, but it was pretty great the day before it too.  (Laughter.)

So, anyway, now, we had COVID.  It was devastating in human ways, in economic ways.  So, President Biden gets in, and he doesn’t want to under suit the way the Republicans required President Obama to do back when he was president.  So, he says, “Give me this big recovery program,” which is not everything he asked for, but it was big and robust.  And he starts to implement it.  And he gets criticized because not all the programs were solved the day after tomorrow. 

But you know the whole structure of the international economy, the supply chains, everything was thrown out of whack.  And Joe Biden and Vice President Harris and their whole team methadic- — methodically began trying to put the Humpty Dumpty back together again.  And we’re doing really well, I think.  (Applause.)

I mean, I think you — and because — yes, there was inflation, but there is nothing he could have done about that, unless it was to throw the country into depression. 

I mean, when — you start when everything stops.  So, you’ve got a shortage of everything and the supply chains are all messed up, there’s going to be inflation in the beginning.  But he’s building all these chip plants around America and doing all these other things.  (Applause.) 

I noticed we finally got a big electric charging station for — in Queens for all the yellow cabs in New York that are coming and stuff like that.  This stuff is happening, and you’re going — 

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  And we cut the deficit.

PRESIDENT CLINTON:  — to feel it all.  It’s going to get better and better and better and better and better.  (Applause.)  So, we should not make 2016’s mistake.  We should stay with what works and not let people who try to undo it take credit for what happened.  (Applause.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  And ju- — just — because I know we’re running out of time, Stephen, but — but I do want to make this point, be- — because Joe understands this deeply.  Bill understood it. 

There are structural problems in the economy that can frustrate people — you know, long-term trends in terms of growing inequality because of globalization and technology; you know, the suppression of unions, which Joe has specifically battled against — (applause) — making sure that working people have the right to collectively bargain. 

And so, you know, the frustrations that people feel in a lot of situations — if you’re working hard and your paycheck is — is getting stretched, you know, beyond the breaking point and you’re worrying about rent and you’re concerned about the price of gas, you know, it’s understandable.  And one of the things that all three of us accept when you have this extraordinary privilege of serving the American people is, if it’s happening on your watch, then even if you didn’t have anything to do with it and even if you’re making progress, there’s going to be frustrations and sometimes those will be directed towards your office.  That’s part of the deal. 

But the thing that not only Joe has to communicate, we who support Joe have to communicate, is, at the end of the day, who do you think is actually going to look out for you?  (Applause.)  Who do you think is going to fight on your behalf?  (Applause.)  Who’s gone through tough financial times?  Who has actually experienced the worry of a child getting sick and — and you trying to figure out, you know, how you’re going to pay for it? 

And Joe has gone through those struggles.  He’s got family members who have experienced that fear and pain and have gotten knocked down and had to get back up. 

And, at the end of the day, what you’re — what you want, not just out of your president, but out of your government, is people’s whose values are rooted in wanting to make sure everybody gets its shot —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Gets a fighting chance.  (Applause.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  — that — that is willing to fight on behalf of people who weren’t born into privilege.  And — and that’s who Joe Biden is. 

And so, you know, when we make an argument about the economy, it’s not because we don’t recognize that they’re real problems and that they’re commu- — entire communities that are still feeling like they’re being left behind.  And it’s legitimate for them to feel frustrated.  And they’re going to occasionally take it out on the president.  And that’s fair.  Because, you know, Joe volunteered for the job — (laughter) — as we all did. 

But, at the end of the day, you do have to make a choice.  And the question then becomes: Who is it that really sees you and cares about you?

I can — (laughs) — I’m pretty confident the other guy doesn’t.  This guy does.  (Applause.)

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  You know —

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  That’s why we’re going to have to fight so hard —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  Thank you.  Let me say one thing —

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  — over the next eight months.

PRESIDENT CLINTON:  We do.

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  My — my dad, who was a very well-read guy.  He didn’t get to go to college.  He got into Johns Hopkins.  He was in Baltimore when the war began, and he never got to go.  But my dad used to say, “Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck.  It’s about your dignity.  It’s about your family.  It’s about having a little bit left over at the end of the month — just a little bit.  It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘Everything is going to be okay,’ and mean it.”

What I decided to do is to follow along with these guys have done.  I wanted to build a middle class — build the economy from the middle class out and the bottom up. 

When that happens, everybody does well.  The wealthy do very well.  (Applause.)  But guess what, guys?  Anybody think the tax system is fair?  It’s about time the weal- — the very super wealthy start paying their fair share.  (Applause.)

I’ll give you one example.  We have a thousand billionaires in America — a thousand billionaires in America.  If we, in fact, just raise their — you know what they pay in taxes?  8.3 percent of their income — federal taxes.  AUDIENCE:  Booo — PRESIDENT BIDEN:  If they just paid 25 percent, we’d raise $400 million — billion dollars over 10 years and be able to wipe out the debt.  We’d be able to do so much more.  Just paying your fair share.  (Applause.)

MR. COLBERT:  President Biden —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  By the way, we cut the deficit — I know you got to wrap up.  Cut the — we cut the deficit by the Medicare things we changed.  That saved the taxpayer $170 billion a year — (applause) — $170 billion because they don’t have to pay the price (inaudible).  Anyway, I — I don’t want to get going.  (Laughter.)  “Wrap up.”  I’m wrapping.  I’m hushing up.

MR. COLBERT:  We — we have come to the end of our evening.  I just want to ask you before we go, sir.  A lot of people do impressions of you.  Have you seen my impression of you?  (Laughter.)  I’m the first to admit it’s not very good.  (Laughter.)  This — the — I put on your glasses.  They do a lot of the work.  (Laughter.)

(Impersonating President Biden.)  Now, we go to do the — and then we got to talk quiet.   (Laughter.)

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  You know, you’re a pre- — a pretty dull president when you’re known for two things: Ray-Ban sunglasses and ice cream. 

(President Biden puts on sunglasses.)  (Laughter and applause.)

MR. COLBERT:  Gentlemen, would you care to join us in our — in the impression of President Biden?  (Laughter.)

(President Clinton and President Obama put on sunglasses.)  (Applause.)

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking President Clinton, President Obama, and President Joseph Biden —

PRESIDENT BIDEN:  By the way, Dark Brandon is real.  (Applause.)

MR. COLBERT:  Ladies and gentlemen, the presidents of the United States.  (Applause.)  Go vote!

9:52 P.M. EDT

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Trump Expected to Highlight Murder of Michigan Woman in Immigration Speech

FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures to supporters as he hosts a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, U.S. March 9, 2024. REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer/File Photo

By Tim Reid and Nathan Layne

(Reuters) - Donald Trump is expected to highlight the murder of a young Michigan woman and the arrest of a suspect who had entered the U.S. illegally from Mexico in a speech on Tuesday focused on his Democratic opponent Joe Biden's immigration policies.

The former Republican president, who has posted on his Truth Social account about the murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia in Grand Rapids last month, is due to make remarks in the city that his campaign has titled "Biden's border bloodbath." Police say Garcia was shot in her car by Brandon Ortiz-Vite, 25, who she was dating.

Peter Hoekstra, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a Trump ally, told Reuters he expects Trump to address Garcia's murder in his speech. Trump's campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump is making the issue of immigrants crossing illegally into the U.S. from Mexico a centerpiece of his campaign. In recent months his rhetoric about migrants has become increasingly dehumanizing. He has called them "vermin" and "animals."

Trump and fellow Republicans have seized on Garcia's murder as an example of what they claim is Biden's failure to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.

Trump accused Biden in a speech in March of engaging in a "conspiracy to overthrow the United States" through lax security policies that have allowed millions of migrants to stream across the U.S. border with Mexico.

Polls show voters in both parties becoming increasingly concerned about the steady stream of migration.

Biden blames Trump for encouraging Republicans not to pass legislation in Congress this year that would have beefed up security at the southern border and introduced new measures aimed at reducing illegal immigration.

The Biden White House is also considering executive actions to reduce illegal immigration in the coming year, two U.S. officials and a third source familiar with the matter told Reuters in February.

"Donald Trump is engaging in extreme rhetoric that promotes division, hate and violence in our country," Michael Tyler, Biden campaign communications director, told reporters on Tuesday. "He encourages white nationalists and cheers on the disgusting behavior of the extreme far right."

Trump and fellow Republicans have also seized on the case of another young woman, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student from Georgia who was allegedly murdered in February by an immigrant who was in the country illegally and who had been released on parole.

Trump frequently claims without evidence that migrants have caused a spike in violent crime in U.S. cities.

TUESDAY'S PRIMARIES

Trump is also set to hold a rally with supporters in Green Bay, Wisconsin, after his Michigan speech. Michigan and Wisconsin are two swing states that could determine whether Biden or Trump occupies the White House next year.

In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by less than one percentage point, and in Michigan by less than three. Both states, two of a handful of battlegrounds that will determine November's election, are expected to be extremely close again this year.

Although both Trump and Biden have mathematically clinched their presidential nominations, they will be on their party's presidential primary ballots in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

The Biden team will be watching for protest votes by Democrats angry over the president's support of Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

In February's presidential primary in Michigan, a state with a large Muslim population, Biden easily won the primary but more than 100,000 Democrats voted "uncommitted", instead of for Biden, as a protest over his Gaza policy.

A similar option is available in Wisconsin on Tuesday, when voters can opt to mark their ballot for "uninstructed delegation".

The "uncommitted" campaign's goal in Wisconsin is to get 20,682 voters to mark their ballots "uninstructed," Wisconsin's version of "uncommitted." The number is significant. Biden beat Trump by that number in the state in 2020.

(Reporting by Tim Reid and Nathan Layne, additional reporting by Nandita Bose; editing by Ross Colvin and Stephen Coates)

Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters .

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