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

Published May 29, 2007

(page 3 of 5)

In practice sessions: Obama struggled to master using the teleprompter. Looking on are Michael Sheehan (standing), a Washington speech coach, and (seated from right) Obama’s wife, Michelle; campaign manager David Axelrod; and chief press aide Robert Gibbs.
 

Because the state budget impasse didn’t end until late on Saturday, Obama and his entourage arrived in Boston by chartered plane around 1:30 in the morning on Sunday, July 25th, the eve of the convention. By the time they reached the Back Bay Hilton, Gibbs recalls, Obama was still a little unsettled. “I had forgotten one of my toiletries and I went downstairs and I could see Barack walking around the lobby because he was sort of wound up and couldn’t sleep,” Gibbs recalls.

The convention had been weighing heavily on Obama’s mind, in part because of his bad experience at the Democratic convention four years earlier. In 2000, fresh from a failed bid for Congress, Obama was dispirited and nearly broke, and he was planning to skip the convention in Los Angeles. At the last minute, though, some friends persuaded him to catch a cheap flight. The rent-a-car facility at the Los Angeles airport, however, declined his American Express card-it was maxed out. When he finally got to the convention hall, he could not get a floor pass and had to watch on the TV screens around the Staples Center. He recalls the episode in The Audacity of Hope: “Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and my newfound role as convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my appearance in Boston might not go very well.”

In the weeks preceding the Boston convention, Jim Cauley, Obama’s campaign manager, says Obama would frequently call or e-mail late at night to discuss logistics, repeatedly reminding him: “Jim, we’ve got to nail this-no mistakes.” But the first crisis hit even before the team landed in Boston. His campaign had printed 5,000 cardboard placards for delegates to hold up on the convention floor during Obama’s speech-a great visual for television. But the U-Haul bringing them broke down in Ohio; the signs arrived only hours before the convention deadline.

Obama managed to grab a few winks of sleep his first night in Boston and then appeared on Meet the Press. The host, Tim Russert, questioned him about telling The Atlantic Monthly, “Sometimes Kerry just doesn’t have that oomph.” Obama had made the remark before being picked as the keynoter. With Russert, he downplayed the comments, and the gaffe didn’t make many new headlines. Still, it left the Obama team feeling uneasy.

Adding to the tension in Boston was Obama’s rough start at rehearsals. Every convention speaker, even past presidents, is required to practice his speech at least once before delivering it. Obama had three rehearsals, one hour each, before Tuesday’s speech. Two rehearsal rooms were set up in the lower level of the FleetCenter, in the locker rooms for the Boston Bruins and the Celtics, made over with blue velvet curtains and a practice podium outfitted with a teleprompter. Obama, who prefers speaking extemporaneously, had no experience working with a teleprompter or addressing a group this loud and lively. Michael Sheehan, a Washington speech coach who advised Obama, says the prime-time convention speeches are “unexpectedly hard for several reasons: The noise is overwhelming, and on top of it, you’re speaking to three audiences at a time: the live audience; the big JumboTron in the convention hall; and to the TV cameras. It’s a juggling act.”

Obama struggled early on to master the mechanics of this new speaking environment. First, he had to train himself to read the words off the teleprompter screens without having it look or sound as if he were reading. He also had to adjust his speaking style. “There’s this impulse with these big, live speeches to orate as if you’re on a podium in the town square,” says Axelrod. “When you’re giving these speeches, you’re speaking not just to the crowd but primarily to a TV audience, and the microphone does all the work for you, so you don’t need to bellow.”

Next, Obama had to master a technique known in professional public-speaking circles as “surfing” or “riding” the applause. Sheehan explains how it works: “Because people at home don’t hear when there’s a big burst of applause-you hear it minimally in the background-speakers have to talk over the applause; otherwise there’s long gaps of silence. People are clapping but you can’t hear it at home-it’s like, sentence-pause-sentence-pause-sentence-pause. It’s just deadly.”

During one practice session, a Kerry speechwriter interrupted to say that Obama would need to rephrase or cut one of the lines from his speech because it was too similar to a line in Kerry’s acceptance remarks. The line in question was the climax to Obama’s famous passage on the red-states, blue-states divide. That passage, as Obama delivered it, reads: “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states-red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” Axelrod says Obama had originally written the passage to end with something like, “We’re not red states and blue states; we’re all Americans, standing up together for the red, white, and blue.” But to satisfy Kerry’s speechwriters, Axelrod says, Obama grudgingly cut out the line. A transcript of Kerry’s competing text reads: “Maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us as one America: red, white, and blue.”

After the rehearsal ended, Obama was furious. “That fucker is trying to steal a line from my speech,” he griped to Axelrod in the car on the way back to their hotel, according to another campaign aide who was there but asked to remain anonymous. Axelrod says he does not recollect exactly what Obama said to him. “He was unhappy about it, yeah,” he says, but adds that Obama soon cooled down. “Ultimately, his feeling was: They had given him this great opportunity; who was he to quibble over one line?”

Convention officials confirm that Obama was told to change his line, but they could not say for sure if Kerry-or, more likely, his speechwriters-had pilfered it. Still, several convention officials who spoke on condition of anonymity say pilfering happened elsewhere. Take the line “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty,” the opening words of Kerry’s speech, which he delivered with a crisp military salute. That line, insiders say, was originally in a speech written by Max Cleland, the former senator from Georgia who had lost three limbs in Vietnam. After Kerry’s team read Cleland’s remark, they decided to appropriate it. “They stole that line,” says one official. “They said to Cleland: ‘Guess what: Kerry likes your closing line so much he wants to use it.’” The official added, “I don’t believe that was the case with Obama; I have to take them at their word that the line was already in Kerry’s speech.”

As unhappy as he was about losing the line from his speech, Obama had far bigger worries. At the final rehearsal on Monday afternoon, the day before his speech, he was still tripping over some of the text and not yet fully comfortable using the teleprompter. “We knew Barack could do a little more,” says Kevin Lampe, a Chicago-based Democratic consultant who helped with rehearsals. “He knew he could do a little more.”

Obama was buoyed, however, by the hordes of reporters and well-wishers who descended on him as he walked around the streets of Boston on Monday with his close friend Martin Nesbitt. “I said to Barack, ‘You know this is pretty unbelievable, man-you’re like a rock star,’” Nesbitt recalls. “He said, ‘Yeah, but it might be a little worse tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Really? Why do you say that?’” Nesbitt recalls that Obama then smiled and replied: “It’s a pretty good speech.”

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