The Speech

When Barack Obama launched into his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was still an obscure state senator from Illinois. By the time he finished 17 minutes later, he had captured the nation's attention and opened the way for a run at the presidency. A behind-the-scenes look at the politicking, plotting, and preparation that went into Obama's breakthrough moment

By David Bernstein

(page 2 of 5)

Five days before he is to address the convention, Obama reviews a draft of the speech at his Senate campaign office in Chicago.

Talking to reporters on the first morning of the convention, New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson, the convention's chairman, tried to promote the lineup of prime-time speakers. He ticked off the names of those scheduled for the first night-political heavyweights who included Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. "You'll see exciting speeches the second day," he continued. Then, drawing a blank, he hollered to a nearby aide, "Who are they?"

One was Obama, who was little known outside Illinois before the convention. As the Philadelphia Daily News headlined on the morning of his keynote address: "Who the Heck Is This Guy?" Obama admitted in interviews at the time that he was "totally surprised" by the speaking invitation. (Through his spokesman, he declined to be interviewed for this story.) As he put it in his book The Audacity of Hope: "The process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me."

A closer look, however, reveals less mystery and more politics.

On March 3, 2004, the day after John Kerry effectively locked up the presidential nomination with victories in nine of the ten Super Tuesday states, he began putting his imprint on the July convention in Boston by tapping veteran Massachusetts political operative Jack Corrigan to run the four-day event. By early summer, Corrigan and a group of about a dozen convention organizers that included Kerry's media adviser, Robert Shrum, had started discussing the potential roster of speakers. In a series of meetings and conference calls over several weeks, the names of various keynote contenders were tossed about. Today, the convention planners say they were looking for an attention-getting lead-in to the night's main attraction, Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. "There was a huge, long list that spanned all across the party," recalls Mary Beth Cahill. "Everybody had their favorite." The roster, insiders say, was soon narrowed down to a short list that mainly included Democratic governors from key battleground states that were likely to decide the presidential race: Jennifer Granholm of Michigan; Janet Napolitano of Arizona; Tom Vilsack of Iowa; Mark Warner of Virginia; and Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

Obama made the cut, though some planners worried about his thin political résumé and, to a lesser extent, the fact that he and Kerry were somewhat at odds over the war in Iraq. (In 2002, Kerry voted to authorize military action against Iraq; Obama opposed the war from the get-go.) Obama detractors felt that he should get a prominent speaking role but not the keynote, according to interviews with knowledgeable insiders.

Kerry and his aides first began to zero in on Obama after Kerry's two-day campaign swing through Illinois in April. Stumping together at a vocational center on Chicago's West Side and at a downtown fundraiser at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, Kerry came away impressed with the charismatic political hot shot. Watching Obama address the donors who filled the hotel's ballroom, Kerry's national finance chairman, the Chicago investment banker Louis Susman, told Kerry: "This guy will be on the national ticket someday." To which Kerry replied, according to an account in the Chicago Tribune: "Well, I have a way in mind for him to be at the national convention this year. He should be one of the faces of our party now, not years from now."

Corrigan says he had already heard good things about Obama, including from a friend who had been a law-school classmate of Obama's and recalled the stirring speech that Obama made when he was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review. Meanwhile, several of Obama's top advisers were also making the case for him. Darrel Thompson, Obama's campaign chief of staff, says he met with Kerry's two deputy campaign managers to press for the keynote slot for Obama, or, short of that, for a prime-time spot, when the TV networks would be airing the speeches live. David Axelrod and David Plouffe, an Axelrod partner who now manages Obama's presidential campaign, also lobbied Kerry staffers. "We wanted to let them know that Barack would give a great speech," says Thompson.

Insiders say the list was narrowed by mid-June to two finalists: Obama and Jennifer Granholm, the attractive young governor of Michigan. Sitting around the conference room at Kerry's campaign headquarters in downtown Washington one afternoon, Cahill finally chose Obama. "I was pretty convinced he was going to be the best," says Cahill. And Kerry? "He was fine with it."

It's difficult to know what role Obama's race played in getting the keynote slot (Granholm is white). Corrigan and other former Kerry officials say that Obama's African American background was one of several attributes that made him appealing, along with his eloquence, his youth, and his optimistic message. Still, at the time of the announcement, black leaders were criticizing Kerry for not doing enough to reach out to African American voters, whose support would be crucial to winning the presidency.

Senate politics played a role, too. With Democrats needing to pick up just two seats to gain control of the Senate, Obama's campaign was crucial because a Republican-held seat, Peter Fitzgerald's, was up for grabs. On June 25th, Obama's Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race, and state and national GOP leaders floated big-time names as a replacement, from former governor Jim Edgar to ex-Bears coach Mike Ditka. The Democrats hoped that giving Obama the high-profile speaking slot would scare away potentially tough Republican challengers. "We really wanted to get Fitzgerald's seat back," says Cahill. (In the end, the best the GOP could come up with was the fiery right-wing radio host from Maryland Alan Keyes, whose candidacy was announced about one week after Obama's convention speech. Obama won the election easily with 70 percent of the vote.)

* * *

Obama confers with Axelrod after the convention has gotten under way.

Obama received the good news from Cahill just before the start of the July 4th weekend, more than a week before Kerry's campaign publicly announced him as the keynoter. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama recalls being in a car heading from Springfield to Chicago for a campaign event when Cahill called him on his cell phone. After he hung up, he turned to his driver and said, "This is pretty big."

Soon after, Axelrod discussed the speech with Obama: "Almost immediately he said to me, ‘I know what I want to do-I want to talk about my story as part of the American story.' He had a very clear concept in his head," Axelrod recalls.

Obama composed the first draft in longhand on a yellow legal pad, mostly in Springfield, where the state senate was in overtime over a budget impasse. Wary of missing important votes, Obama stayed close to the Capitol, which wasn't exactly conducive to writing. "There were times that he would go into the men's room at the Capitol because he wanted some quiet," says Axelrod. Once, state senator Jeff Schoenberg walked into the men's lounge and found Obama sitting on a stool along the marble countertop near the sinks, reworking the speech. "It was a classic Life magazine moment," says Schoenberg, who snapped a picture of Obama with his cell-phone camera.

Obama scribbled down ideas on scraps of paper whenever inspiration struck. He also read transcripts and watched reels of film highlighting past keynote speeches that Gibbs, his communications director, had put together for him. David Katz, a former Obama campaign aide, says Obama spent a couple of weeks working late at night a few hours at a time. "We'd finish [the senate day] at 9 or 10 p.m., and he'd write till 1 or 2 in the morning," recalls Katz. Axelrod says Obama "does a lot of composing in his head, so by the time he sits down to write, it's a matter of transcribing his thoughts to the written page."

In fact, not only had Obama thought out a lot of the speech in advance; he had been road-testing much of it for months on the campaign trail. In that sense, it became a greatest hits collection of rhetoric drawn from his stump speeches. "It was, basically, a variation of his canned speech," says Dan Shomon, the political director of Obama's 2004 Senate campaign.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama recalled working on the speech in his hotel room, jotting down notes for a rough draft while watching a basketball game on television. The eureka moment, he wrote, came while he was thinking about some of the real-life stories that he had heard on the campaign trail, and he remembered a phrase that his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had once used in a sermon: "the audacity of hope." That linchpin phrase, he decided, summed up exactly what he wanted to say. He turned off the TV and started to write.

Axelrod was vacationing in Italy when a faxed copy of Obama's first draft arrived. "I remember being in the hotel room," he says, "and I'm reading one page, then the next page, then handing them to my wife, and I quickly realized: This is an incredible speech-this is really literature."

While his aides knew that the speech was exceptionally good, they also knew that, at roughly 25 minutes, it was way too long. Convention officials had initially told Obama and his staff that he would have just eight minutes. "We can't do a keynote in eight minutes," Axelrod told them. The Obama team were told to try their best to shorten it, or convention speechwriters would do it themselves.

For the next two weeks or so, Gibbs says, Obama and a small circle of aides spent many of their waking hours going over the speech line by line, trying to find paragraphs, passages, or even just words that could be cut. John Kupper, a principal at Axelrod's consulting firm who helped edit the speech, says Obama was gracious but not always receptive to their edits. "I would take things out of the speech and send it back to Barack," he says. "Invariably, the speech would come back with most of my cuts restored." Adds Gibbs, "There were some sacrosanct lines where he was like, ‘Look, I'm not cutting that; OK, so we can get 30 seconds by taking out that paragraph, but the speech doesn't work without that paragraph.'" In the end, though, there was no way of getting around cuts.

What wound up on the chopping block? Obama's campaign declined to release Obama's original version of the speech, so the details are sketchy. Axelrod and others say that the cuts were minimal. By shortening some passages of Obama's biography, lopping a few anecdotes, and tightening language throughout the speech, Obama and his aides shaved off roughly eight minutes. When all was said and done, says Kupper, "we threw ourselves at the mercy of the Kerry people and said, ‘We've got a 17-minute speech.' And, frankly, after they saw it, I think they recognized what we recognized, that it was a very good speech, and they became less concerned about the length."

* * *

Giving a speech at a political convention is a tightly controlled process, coming under the watchful eyes of convention organizers and a team of professional speechwriters who read, edit, and fact-check every speech-from the prime-time addresses to the three-minute homilies in the daytime when the hall is mostly empty. At the 2004 convention, Vicky Rideout, a former speechwriter for the 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, oversaw the group of 15 or so speechwriters-mainly ex–Clinton White House writers and Capitol Hill pros. Working from a windowless FleetCenter room dubbed the Boiler Room, the wordsmiths and spinmeisters vetted around 200 speeches. They wrote some speeches entirely, and trimmed or tweaked others. Most of all, they made sure the speakers kept their speeches short, on message (meaning focused on Kerry and vice presidential candidate John Edwards), and positive-no personal attacks on Bush.

Around the first week of July, Rideout called Axelrod and Gibbs to discuss Obama's speech and to offer her help. "They told me that [Obama] was going to work on some thoughts and we'd talk again in a week or so," she recalls. "Then a couple weeks went by." Rideout says she got a little nervous when Obama did not turn in the speech promptly. For the next several days, she says, she traded messages with Obama's staff: "They kept telling me it was coming any second." When it did not come a few days later, she followed up again. "I was like, ‘OK-I really want to see it now,'" she says. To her relief, Rideout says, Obama's campaign turned in the speech around July 20th, a week before the convention. "I knew everything was going to be OK as soon as I saw it," she says.

Still, says Rideout, the speech needed trimming and editing. "There was not a lot of Kerry stuff in the first draft," she says. "We had to pump up the Kerry-Edwards stuff and downplay some of the Illinois stuff."

In retrospect, says Axelrod, "the need to edit the speech actually helped it. The truth is, there was some excess in the speech that hurt the flow a little bit. There was a little more detail about his life than we had time to share. So, the process of editing was really a positive."