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Departing Obama Speechwriter: 'I Leave This Job Actually More Hopeful'

Behind most politicians is a speechwriter, typing rapidly somewhere in a small office and trying to channel the boss's voice.

The man who has held perhaps the most prominent speechwriting job of the new millennium is Jon Favreau, a 31-year-old from Massachusetts who was President Obama's chief speechwriter until this month. He started writing for Obama when the president was just a senator in 2005.

He tells Audie Cornish, host of All Things Considered , that writing for the president means walking a line between two worlds.

"You're trying to balance what the president would want to say with what people are looking to hear," he says. "But you need to strike the right balance, because if it's all what people want to hear, that's not true to who he is."

Jon Favreau, President Obama's former chief speechwriter, is pictured on the South Lawn of the White House in 2010. Charles Dharapak/AP hide caption

Favreau says his next stop after the White House is starting a communications consulting firm; he plans to write a screenplay based on his experiences.

"We'll see how long it takes for me to find my own voice again," he says.

Interview Highlights

On the writing process

"My challenge is to make sure that whatever he's thinking, whatever thoughts he has, we can get them down on paper, and we can shape the words to basically what he really wants to say. So our process is, I will sit down with him, we'll talk for 20 or 30 minutes, and he'll have lots of thoughts on the specific speech that he's going to give. And then I will go back, and I'll work with my team, and we will put together a draft that reflects the conversation that the president and I had.

"And then we'll start going back and forth. Sometimes he will just make line edits himself and send the draft back. Or sometimes he will want to take the speech in an entirely different direction, and he will write six or seven pages of scrawled handwriting on a yellow legal pad, and we'll go back at it that way."

On the editing process

"There have been times where I'll have a phrase in there and he'll take it out — and then I'll explain to him, 'Well, I put it in here because if we do it this way, maybe it'll be a sound bite or maybe we'll get a quote that way or, rhythmic-wise, it'll be better.' And ... once in a while he'll say, 'Oh, I think you're right, let's do it this way.' And sometimes he'll say, 'No, I think the way I had it was better.' And that's just how we work. We have a very honest relationship."

On collaborating on Obama's famous race speech

"When I talk about the speech, I always say, you know, the stuff in the speech that you could hear almost any other politician say is mostly the stuff that I contributed. ... Before he gave it, he called me after a long day of campaigning, and he spoke for an hour about what he wanted in that speech. He told me it was going to be random thoughts off the top of his head, and they were not random at all. He had the entire logical argument all ready. ... He laid out the whole thing."

On his departing thoughts

"I leave this job actually more hopeful than when I first got there, and that is because I think that the president went into this more realistically than many people thought that he did. I've been working on these speeches since 2005, and so I know that almost every speech, he makes sure we have the caveat that, 'This is going to be hard.' ... He's not mistaken about how difficult some of this stuff is."

Jon Favreau Shares Five Lessons from President Obama

Former Obama speechwriter shares tips, experiences during Duke talk

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What would it be like to hone speechwriting skills working with a partner who is arguably one of the greatest orator presidents in American history? 

On Tuesday (April 21), Jon Favreau answered that question during a public talk at Duke University, “Words Matter: Storytelling with President Obama in the Age of Sound Bites.” 

In 2005, Favreau began working for then U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, and in 2007 he became Obama's director of speechwriting. Favreau continued in that position until leaving the White House in 2013, at age 32. He then co-founded Fenway Strategies, a messaging and media consulting firm. 

During his talk at Duke, Favreau identified five major lessons he learned during his time working closely with the president. The first was that the story is more important than the words: avoid chasing catchy slogans in favor of focusing on the overall argument. 

The second was the importance of humor: take your job seriously, but not yourself. Third was to talk like “a normal human being”: leave out shorthand and jargon to be accessible. 

Fourth was the need for honesty and authenticity: be personal and be courageous. The last lesson was to maintain idealism: cynicism and hope are both choices, so choose hope, he said. 

Favreau also shared meaningful experiences through personal anecdotes, such as a phone conversation with Ann Nixon Cooper, a 106 year-old civil rights veteran. The purpose of the call was to discuss her inclusion in the 2008 election speech. The connection was so meaningful that Favreau said he hid under his desk as polling results were coming in just to have a few more minutes with her on the line. 

Audience members were invited to ask Favreau questions directly. He addressed the challenges of learning another person’s voice and the importance of real collaboration between writers and speakers.

On dealing with negative criticism, such as vitriolic tweets during speeches, he advised to always learn more and improve yourself, but when you make a decision, let the chips fall where they may. 

Favreau's visit to Duke was hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Humanities Writ Large Network on Democracy and Law: Ancient and Modern . The visit included informal discussions and a writing workshop with undergraduates earlier in the day. His talk was co-sponsored by the Sanford School of Public Policy  and the  DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy . 

For more information on his visit, read the Storify collection of social media responses.

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• What Is Cinema?

Jon Favreau vs. Jon Favreau: Your Guide to Distinguishing the Obama Speechwriter from the Hollywood Filmmaker

On March 1, White House wunderkind Jon Favreau will retire his position as President Obama’s chief speechwriter. According to several outlets , the 31-year-old is planning to pack up his collection of aviator sunglasses and head out West to script dialogue for people other than the nation’s first in command. Aside from dealing with the normal challenges that a transcontinental move and a career change present, if he decides to “go Hollywood,” the Massachusetts-born rhetoric whiz will be faced with a familiar-sounding obstacle: namely, another Jon Favreau with impressive writing credits. In particular, the one who bridged his success as the screenwriter and star of the 1996 comedy Swingers into a career as a director, producer, and actor whose films ( Elf , Cowboys & Aliens , Iron Man ) have collectively brought in more than a billion dollars at the box office.

So just how will Obama’s “mind reader” stack up against the Iron Man –franchise maker, should the former join the latter in the entertainment capital of the world? As a service to you—future confused partygoer unsure of which one is chatting you up by the bar—we’ve compiled a guide to differentiating the two famous Favreaux, below.

Washington, D.C.’s Jon Favreau Hollywood’s Jon Favreau Birth Year: 1981 1966 Provenance: Winchester, Massachusetts Queens, New York Documented Heritage: French-Canadian French-Canadian-Italian Distinguishing Physical Characteristics: Buzz haircut and gap-toothed smile Robust jawline Actor Who Would Play Him in His Lifetime Biopic: Chris Evans Steve Guttenberg University Pedigree: Valedictorian at College of the Holy Cross Dropout from Queens College Nerdy Formative Interests: Classical piano, College Democrats Dungeons & Dragons, Hacky Sack Unlikely Former Jobs: Telemarketer Assistant at Bear Stearns Early Career Flop: John Kerry’s failed 2004 presidential campaign The 1994 comedy PCU Breakout Role: “Favs,” Obama’s right-hand man and oratorical mastermind “Mike Peters,” a struggling comedian and successful mope in Swingers Battle Cry He’s Credited with Making Famous: “Yes, we can” “Vegas, baby! Vegas!” Low-Profile Pastimes: Prepping the president’s speeches at Starbucks Geeking out with his comic brethren at Comic-Con Critically Panned Hiccup: An ill-advised photo op with a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton Couples Retreat (he wrote the script and co-starred) Hiccup Comeuppance: A good-natured rib from camp Hillary None . . . the film still grossed more than $100 million worldwide High-Profile Primetime-TV Ex: Rashida Jones Monica Geller (whom Favreau’s character dated on Friends ) Influences: Robert Kennedy Martin Scorsese Recent Paycheck: $172,200 for 2012 $10,000,000 (reportedly) for Cowboys & Aliens

Coincidentally, Washington, D.C.’s Jon Favreau would not be the first Obama speechwriter to move to Hollywood, only to risk being mistaken on paper with an established entertainment personality. Favreau’s former colleague, Jon Lovett, currently the co-creator of the NBC comedy 1600 Penn , and not the whiny-voiced S.N.L. alum Jon Lovitz, also shares this distinction. However, Favreau may not have to worry about this outcome: after hearing news of his potential move, Hollywood’s Jon Favreau joked that he should relocate to Washington to “confuse the hell out of everyone.”

Julie Miller

Hollywood correspondent.

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Beginnings: The Breakthrough Moment

Jon favreau, speechwriter, “for the first time, obama sees it and he’s like, ‘i actually don’t have that many edits’.”.

• Published Jan 12, 2016

I started writing speeches for John Kerry when I was 21. And I basically only got the job because I was a press assistant on the campaign, and we were losing to Howard Dean, and the campaign was running out of money and there was a big shake-up and all these people got fired, and they needed a deputy speechwriter and at that point they couldn’t really afford to hire a real one. No one really wanted to join what looked like a sinking ship. He went on to have a whole general election, but throughout that whole time, I always sort of thought that I had landed the job by accident. As a writer, you can never tell if you’re good anyway without doubting yourself.

I met with Obama after Kerry lost and Obama won the Senate seat. Robert Gibbs had recruited me for this job because he was my boss when I was with the Kerry campaign. And he’s like, “Look, Obama’s never worked with a speechwriter before in his life — he’s written all his own stuff. But now he’s a senator; he’s going to need to learn to work with someone, whether he likes it or not.” And when I met with Obama he was unbelievably nice, we had a great conversation, it was the most easygoing interview I’ve ever had. And at the very end he said, “Well, I still don’t think I need a speechwriter, but you seem nice enough, so let’s give this a whirl.”

So I start with Obama through the Senate, thinking, you know, I had been at the convention when he gave that speech in 2004 . That was all him, and that hung over my head the entire time I started writing for him. Because I thought, Never will I help write a speech like this, right? He is the master — I was there when he gave one of the best speeches I heard, and he wrote it. And his first two years in the Senate, I think we wrote some decent speeches together, and then he announced for president, and — it’s hard to remember now — but for most of 2007, he was badly trailing Hillary Clinton. And on the stump, he would go and give 40-, 50-minute speeches in Iowa that were long and sort of rambling and workmanlike, and he’s better than that but it was a tough race, and when a race gets tough there’s more pressure and everyone starts yelling at you, you start just going out and saying all kinds of different things and making your speeches longer. The knock against him was “Oh, she’s all substance and you’re all style.” So to counter that I think Obama went out and tried to show everyone just how smart he was on every issue, and the speeches became very long and involved. And, you know, I’m Mr. Speechwriter in the campaign, and I’m like, “Well, I’m not fixing this, so I’m sort of a failure here.”

And so now it’s like October of 2007, and there’s literally headlines that say — I had one hanging up from the New York Post that said, “ Hillary Ready for Her Coronation .” We were down in Iowa, and our last chance there is the speech that Obama’s giving at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa. A couple of us that had been with the Kerry campaign in 2004 remembered that that was the speech that Kerry gave that sort of turned the race around and helped him beat Dean in Iowa. And so we looked at the speech the same way. Now, the interesting thing about this speech is, all the candidates deliver this speech. It’s the last time that all the candidates deliver a speech one after another before the caucusing begins, and the whole media’s there — national media, local media. There’s no prompter, and there’s a time limit of about ten minutes. So you have to deliver a ten-minute speech without a prompter and you have to make your best case for your candidacy. All the pressure was on this speech; everyone was like, “This is our only hope here. Maybe we can pull even with Hillary after this or catch up in the polls.” And because there was so much pressure on it, writing and drafting were impossible — there’s a million conference calls with everyone saying, “Emphasize this, emphasize that.” Me and Ben Rhodes and Adam Frankel probably went through ten, 15 drafts of that speech, staying up till three in the morning, having them rejected the next day by people because everyone was so involved. Obama didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say, and Axelrod didn’t know, and there was all kinds of calls and meetings.

So, finally, there was a speech planned a couple weeks before the JJ that we sort of just made up — it was basically a year before the actual election, right? Like the anniversary of the year before the real election. And no one on the campaign was really paying attention to that speech because everyone was so focused on the JJ. So what I did is I pretty much wrote a speech that I thought he should give at the JJ. I kind of snuck it in there. But I always remember now: The night that he was on SNL, I had a bunch of people over at my apartment in Chicago. He was supposed to give that speech that I had written, the practice speech, that day. I hadn’t heard how the speech went but I had a bunch of people over at my apartment to look at the SNL skit. It’s like 11, 11:30. And suddenly I get a call from Axelrod and he said, “Obama just gave the speech — totally blew up the place. He loves it and he says that that’s what the JJ needs to be. But the trick is, he needs you to cut this 20-minute speech down to a ten-minute speech so he can start practicing, and he needs you to do it by tomorrow morning.” So I was in my apartment with everyone over, I’ve had a beer or two, but immediately I kick everyone out, I change over to Red Bull and coffee, and I walked down to the campaign at midnight and stayed up all night until about 10 or 11 a.m. the next day, and I wrote the JJ speech. And I finished the draft and for the first time, you know, Obama sees it and he’s like, “I actually don’t have that many edits. I think it’s a pretty good speech.” So he practices that speech, practices memorizing that speech more than I had ever seen him do before, because he’s never really had to memorize a speech word for word. Like when we were at a hotel in Des Moines a couple weeks before the speech, if you walked by Obama’s hotel room you could hear him practicing the speech to himself and the mirror, just trying to memorize it.

There are two important moments in that speech . One paragraph distilled the whole race of why Obama and not Hillary at the time, right? Which was like, “This part of Jefferson and Jackson and of Kennedy and Roosevelt knows that we’re better off when we lead not by polls but by principle; not by calculation but by conviction. And that’s what this party’s about.” Something like that. And then there was this nice thing at the end that a lot of people didn’t notice in the campaign just because it wasn’t central to the message against Hillary, but he sort of quieted down at the very end of that speech and he said, “I’ll never forget that I would never be where I am right now unless someone somewhere stood up for me when it was hard.” You know, when it wasn’t easy. “And then because that one person stood up, a few more stood up, and then a few thousand more stood up, and then millions more stood up, and because they stood up we changed the world.” And that was sort of the first time we linked the history of him possibly being the first black president and civil rights with a message of the campaign, which was grassroots organizing to make a difference. And that’s sort of how we ended that speech, and that was always pretty meaningful to me.

So we get to the JJ, and somehow, by the luck of the draw, the order of the candidates’ speeches was that all the other candidates go first, Hillary goes second to last, and Obama goes last. So all these candidates go, get out of the way. Hillary gives her speech and the crowd’s all quiet for Hillary because she’s obviously the front-runner. And she gives a speech that is like all … I mean, you could tell there were a lot of slogans that were shopped around in her campaign. So the speech was something about “Turn up the heat, turn America around,” and all the supporters in the stands were supposed to yell, “Turn up the heat!” It didn’t work that well. And then there’s a pause and then Obama gets up there and he delivered — way better than it was written — the JJ speech. I was sitting there watching all the reporters, and all the reporters were like, “That’s it — that’s the speech. This is something big.” The crowd went completely insane. Even some of the other candidates’s supporters were going nuts.

The last time I had been in a room where he gave a speech like that was 2004, when I was a kid working for John Kerry. And to have been there in Iowa at that moment when I had helped work on the speech and just help sort of see, you know, history unfolding in this arena, it was incredible and it was the first moment in my life that I thought to myself, Okay, maybe I got the hang of this. From then on it felt like something clicked and then we had the Iowa victory speech and the New Hampshire speech, the “Yes We Can” speech and all that other kind of stuff. And it worked out from then on, but the JJ was sort of the first moment that I was like, Okay, I think I might have something to contribute here. I think I can be of use. That to me was probably the breakthrough.

It was also the first time I thought we would win. I mean, when we started, we thought it was a long shot — “Who knows?” — but then August, September roll around, October even, and we’re like, “I don’t know if we’re gonna do this. It seems we might come up short.” And then he gave that speech and it was great because most people from Chicago were in Des Moines that night, the whole campaign was there, and we — a couple of us had driven out from Chicago to go see the speech, me and my friend, just to be there. And you know, it was the first time that I thought, “It’s gonna happen. It could actually happen and turn this around.”

But it didn’t really resonate for me then. Not yet. It didn’t until we won Iowa. But I remember the first time I saw him after we won Iowa, he came out of his hotel room after editing that speech, and he just looked at me and he goes, “Speeches, man.” And he gave me a big hug and I was like, All right.

• Table of Contents: Jan 11, 2016 issue of New York | Subscribe!

• Politics in Pop Culture
• – The Road to 2020

Jon Favreau: The voice behind a generational voice

By Noah Weiland  /  Dec. 1, 2013, 8:11 p.m.

Jon Favreau left the White House earlier this year after serving as President Obama’s Director of Speechwriting since 2005. A member of the President’s closest group of advisors on the Hill and in the White House, Favreau was a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics last spring, and is currently building his own communications strategy firm, Fenway Strategies, in Washington. Favreau sat down with the Gate to talk about blacking out in front of then-Senator Obama, writing mechanics, and the famous campaign speech he wrote after throwing a house party.

The Gate: This is less of a question than a demand: Tell me your best Joe Biden story that’s under ten minutes-long.

Jon Favreau: [Laughs] My best Joe Biden story is when the President’s personal secretary, Katie Johnson, left the White House. She was thrown many parties…[and] Joe Biden was kind enough...he said, “I want you and ten of your closest friends to come to the Naval Observatory and have a barbeque. Jill isn’t home, I’m there by myself, and it’d be great to have all you guys over.” And so Joe Biden invites us all over to the Naval Observatory, and he has an entire barbeque in the backyard, by the pool. And it’s not one of those things where you...you have to think--if any kind of politician did something like this, and you have all these people over, you have like a drop by, where the politician comes in and says hi, greets everyone for a little while and then says “Have fun, I’m gonna go do whatever.” Joe Biden spent like three or four hours out in the backyard with all of us, sitting and eating with us, and he told so many stories. There were three or four tables set up, and there was about six of us at a table, and he told so many stories about Southern senators and his time in the Senate--amazing story after amazing story, and he just held court. He gives us an entire tour of the Naval Observatory, a personally-led tour. And he’s got his dog, and at one point we’re out on the front lawn and he’s got his golf club, and he whacks the ball and the dog runs after it. It was such a great moment because you get how the public persona of Joe Biden is very much like his private persona, both because he’s very animated and loves telling stories, but also because he’s just this warm, wonderful person who took all this time out of his very busy schedule to hang out with a bunch of people, he, you know, maybe kind of knew.

Gate: What were you first interactions with Obama like?

Favreau : I first met President Obama when I was backstage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. My job was to make sure that all of the speeches that were being delivered at the convention were on message with the Kerry campaign. And so I get a call at one point from the road, where John Kerry was traveling and working on his convention speech, that one of the speakers, a young state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama, was giving the keynote address, and he had a line in his speech that John Kerry had in his speech. And they asked me to go and talk to Obama and ask him to remove this line. I figured this was some kind of sick hazing ritual. So I walk into the room where Obama is practicing his convention speech for the very first time, and I see Robert Gibbs, who I knew because he had been my boss in the Kerry campaign when I was an assistant. And I ask Gibbs if he can talk to Obama about this line. He said, “I’m not talking to him! You talk to him!” So I walk up to Obama and mumble what I have to say, and he kind of leans over me and looks down and says, “Are you telling me I have to take out my favorite line in this speech?” At that point I blacked out for a few seconds, and then all of a sudden I was out in the hallway with David Axelrod, who I had just met for the first time. Axe said, “Don’t worry about it; we’re just going to rewrite the line together. It’s going to be fine.” And that was it--I thought that’d be the last time that I ever saw Barack Obama.

Gate: How did you get Obama’s attention after that backstage incident?

Favreau : After the campaign ended, and John Kerry lost, Robert Gibbs emailed me and told me Obama’s looking for a speechwriter. He’s never had one before, but now he needs to learn to work with one because he’s going to be very busy. He asked if I would have breakfast with him in the Senate. It’s his first week there, and he’s just getting used to the place. So we all go to the Senate cafeteria, and there’s the senators-only dining room where all the big wigs are eating, and Barack Obama just grabs his tray, and we sit in the cafeteria next to all the cooks and the waiters. The three of us sit down for breakfast, and Obama just starts asking me about my life, my family, why I got into politics, what college was like. He completely put me at ease. At the end of the interview he said, “You know, I still don’t think I need a speechwriter, but you seem nice enough, so let’s give this a whirl.”

Gate: How improbable was it that someone with your background ended up writing for someone like Barack Obama?

Favreau : David Remnick asked me once, “So you’re a white, twenty-something year-old from a suburb of Boston. How do you identify with the first black president?” I said, you know, look: One of the reasons that any famous speaker--a politician, political leader, or cultural leader--can inspire a nation or the world, is because they tap into certain shared experiences that anyone can relate to. Martin Luther King is a civil rights hero, but he is remembered as an American hero, because “I Have a Dream” can speak to anyone, whether you’re black or white or rich or poor. And not to compare him to Martin Luther King, but what Obama did in that 2004 Convention speech was speak about his own story--the specifics of which are very foreign to most Americans, but the values and the common experiences he speaks about are something anyone can relate to. So I’m very conscious of that, that I’m writing for someone who is always seeking to appeal to anyone, no matter who you are or where you come from, or how you started out.

Gate: In college, or even while you were writing speeches for Kerry, did you ever see yourself as someone who could write speeches for a President? How did your academic experience, or your private reading and writing, influence that transition?

Favreau : I didn’t know specifically that I wanted to be a speechwriter. I’ve always loved writing. I loved writing in college--I was the opinions editor of the newspaper at Holy Cross. I did the same thing in high school, so I was involved in journalism and writing that way. I also, as I got more into politics in college, started writing opinion columns about political issues on campus, and national political issues. By junior or senior year in college I was very interested in political writing, which landed me in the press/communications area of politics, which is what I did for Kerry. But it wasn’t until I really sat down next to the Kerry campaign’s chief speechwriter that I really thought to myself, “I’d really love to be a speechwriter. This sounds like a cool job.”

Gate: How does reading influence speechwriting?

Favreau : It’s something that keeps you full of new ideas, keeps you up to date on what’s going on around you, what the news is, what the political climate is, what the environment is. What I’ve read primarily while I was a speechwriter was the news, because you don’t have time to read anything else. You’re not reading fiction. I kept up to speed on every single political news story there was out there, and I would also be heavily involved in reading the recent research we did for the speeches--speeches of past presidents, historical anecdotes, and research about the policy I was writing about. When there’s free time, and you read something that’s more than just a straight political news story, I try to read long-form pieces in The New Yorker or New York Magazine or The Atlantic . The President reads all of those as well. He’s quite a voracious reader, and he still has historical biographies on his desk that he tries to break into once in a while.

Gate: Where do you think Obama’s very literary voice comes from?

Favreau : It’s interesting: I don’t really know. He kind of wrote Dreams From My Father out of nowhere. As he talks about in Dreams From My Father- -throughout his childhood and early adulthood--he was on this very long journey to discover who he was, and where he fit in in the world around him. I think that journey raised a lot of questions in his own mind that he answered through his writing.

Gate: How did you and Obama use older Presidential speechwriting to guide your own work?

Favreau  I read a lot of FDR, Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, who obviously wasn’t president but wrote some of the best speeches, in my opinion. Lyndon Johnson wrote really great speeches. And then especially Bush and Clinton, as far as what presidents did who sat here in modern times, and maybe had a similar event--how they dealt with it. So there’s two things we’re looking for in past speeches: One is how did a president deal with a specific issue or policy that’s similar to the one we’re dealing with. And two--what kind of inspiration can we gain from the way this president spoke about this issue.

Gate: How has speechmaking formed Obama’s political identity?

Favreau : I think it’s very rare that a single speech launches a politician’s career into the national spotlight. There are a couple speeches that launched his career: the 2002 speech announcing his opposition to the war in Iraq, which is a very powerful speech he gave in Chicago that kind of put him on the map. The 2004 convention speech continued that...What he has done differently is break free from the typical political rhetoric that has invaded most of our politics today. He’s authentic; he tries to speak in an authentic way; he tries to be honest about issues that people are usually afraid to be honest about; he’s not a cautious speaker--to the extent that he can, he says what’s on his mind. When you think about the race speech, the Cairo speech--he will tackle issues in an honest way that you don’t usually expect from politicians. Speeches for him are a way to communicate authentically in a way that some other politicians have been afraid to do.

Gate: Is the success of the speechwriter dependent on having the same ear as the person he or she is writing speeches for? Is it more a matter of language or personality?

Favreau : I think personality helps, for sure. There are a lot of us who have worked for President Obama, and we all have different personalities. I think that if you expect to capture someone’s voice, and do it well, you need to know that person. You don’t need to know them right at the outset, but you need to get to know that person really well. Part of that is reading everything they’ve written and said, but a lot of it is just spending time with them, and not only getting to know the rhythms of that person’s speaking style, but how that person thinks, and you can only get that through a closer relationship. I think that people who try to capture someone’s voice who do it through five different layers of advisors will ultimately fail.

Gate: But did you already have the right kind of ear? Or can you just train yourself to speak a certain way?

Favreau : I think about politics very similarly to the way the President thinks about politics. A number of us do that work for him, so I think that helps. If I came to politics from a different viewpoint, not just if I had different views on specific issues, but if I had just kind of thought about it in a more conventional way, in a more top-down way, in a more Washington-centric way than I do, then I think I would have a harder time working for the President. I think because I came from a background at Holy Cross where I did some community service work and community organizing, and I believe very much in the power of ordinary people being able to do extraordinary things. That was part of my real world experience in college, but that’s also what I learned through sociology and political science, what I learned from the professors I had in school. So I think in that way we’re similar.

Gate: How did being Obama’s speechwriter influence the way you followed and interpreted news? Did you always have to think about events in relation to however you were going to translate them into the language of speeches?

Favreau : I follow news to know what the narrative is, to know what’s on reporters’ minds. People write many different stories, but there’s usually one theme or narrative out of any week. As a president, I don’t think you want to be reactive or responsive to every single narrative that comes out of the press, because they change with the weather, and with every hour. But at the same time, if you completely ignore what’s going on there, that’s the filter by which you can communicate to the American people, primarily. So you have to know what that is and be able to at least act like you’re aware.

Gate: Were you always nervous when you were reading the news that you’d have to sit down soon after and write something about it in the form of a speech? Did that train your mind to always have to be in that mode?

Favreau : Yeah, it does train your mind. Part of it is that this is something happening in the press; this is what everyone’s talking about on TV. I have to figure out how much we’re going to respond to that or not respond to it. It’s not my job alone; it’s the job of the communications director, the senior advisor. Everyone talks about it. The president makes decisions about this as well. But when it actually comes to the words and the lines, part of this is figuring out how exactly you’re going to shape it.

Gate: Is part of the fun as a speechwriter telling stories for someone else?

Favreau : I think most people are reluctant to talk about themselves, to make everything about themselves...As a speechwriter you can help the person you’re writing for bring out personal stories. When I got to the White House, he had this rich array of stories in Dreams From My Father and other places in his life, that when it made sense to put them in speeches about relevant topics in policy areas, I make sure to do that. It’s not just a political thing. I think you are a better storyteller when you draw from your own experiences.

Gate: You wrote a first draft of the Second Inaugural Address in a room in your parents’ house. Did you often feel a serious disconnect between the settings in which you wrote and the significance of what you wrote?

Favreau : I find that I do better if I have a lot of different places to go to. There’s very few times when I’ve sat in one place and drafted an entire speech. I can’t do that. I’ve been to many Starbucks. If I was writing a speech here, I’d write part of it in this office, then go back to my apartment, then try to find a coffee shop, then go outside by the lake. For me I have to go to as many different locations as possible.

Gate: What is President Obama like to work with? What is he like as a writer and editor in that personal of an environment?

Favreau : He’s easy to work with. We obviously write under incredibly high-pressure situations, which I’m always aware of, but he doesn’t necessarily make you aware of that. We were working on the Nobel Peace Prize speech right up until the last second, and Ben Rhodes and I were completely crazed and worried that we weren’t going to make it and thinking horrible thoughts. The President was just completely calm and collected, not worried, as if he had weeks and weeks. He calms you. You don’t expect the president to be calming. As a writer and editor, his edits always add the truth to the speech that’s been missing, that kernel of something that you wouldn’t hear a normal politician say. That’s what he always adds to speeches, substantively. Rhetorically, he has a great ear for rhythm and for really nice words and phrases and imagery that you wouldn’t normally put into a speech, that aren’t cliché, but bring the words on the paper to life.

Gate: There are these well-known photos of drafts of his speeches with his pen marks and edits all across the page. Is there a point at which he’s more concerned with diction and syntax than how the paragraphs are working together?

Favreau : It’s always in two stages: the first stage of different drafts of the speeches are substance. He’s worried about getting the substance right. That’s when he’ll reorder speeches or tell you, “I want this argument first,” or, “You haven’t talked enough about this policy,” or, “I want to make sure I make this argument.” So we go through many drafts that way. Once that’s set, then the back and forth is him just line editing. He doesn’t take pen to paper at the beginning stages when we’re dealing with substantive edits. Those he’ll tell me about. He’ll write on a separate piece of paper some ideas for me. But when he actually gets to the point where he’s marking up the page--that is just line edits, words, rhetoric, all that stuff.

Gate: When and where does he often work on his edits?

Favreau : Always at night. On big speeches like the State of the Union and the inaugural addresses, he’ll do it during the day in the Oval Office if he has an hour. Usually the line editing he can do during the day if he has an hour in the Oval, because it isn’t as labor-intensive. But when he really needs to think about the substance of a speech, he’ll do it at like 1, 2, 3 in the morning when he’s up.

Gate: Did you just get used to sitting right next to the President in the Oval Office with both of you looking at your Macbook? Was that ever weird to you?

Favreau : It’s funny--as a child, especially when I started getting interested in politics, the White House was this dream of mine. I had never had a White House tour. I had never been there. But when I finally arrived there, and I walked into the Oval for the first time with Barack Obama, it was like, “Wow, look where Barack Obama and all of us got. Look where we are right now.” And not, “I’m in the White House with the President.” I knew him for a couple of years before he got to the White House, so I never see him as “Oh my god it’s the President, and I’m sitting with the President.” It’s Barack Obama, who I’ve known for a long time. But The White House to us was still just, “wow.”

Gate: What are the different ways you guys talk to each other?

Favreau : There are many different ways to communicate with the President. Since he works so late at night, he’ll have to call me, so I’ll have to be aware that if my phone rings and it’s a blocked or private number, then it’s probably the White House operator telling me that the President is on the phone. Or we’ll email back and forth about a speech when he has some edits, or when he just needs to see me up in the residence or in the Oval, when there’s time for edits. During the day it’s much easier; he’ll just call me at my desk and I’ll run upstairs, and we’ll talk that way.

Gate: Where does the perception of him being so aloof come from?

Favreau : I honestly think that the aloof characterization comes from a view of the presidency that a lot of folks have in Washington, where the President is king and has a magic wand and can make any problem go away. If he can’t make a problem go away, all he has to do to make a problem go away is twist some arms and bring folks up to Camp David for a drink. Magically, all they care about is being wooed by the President. They don’t actually have constituencies or politics to deal with. They’re just sitting there in Congress waiting to be stroked by the President of the United States. That’s all. So I think that’s where the aloof characterization comes from. The truth is that the President is a people person: he talks all the time to members of Congress; he golfs with Boehner; he does all this stuff. But he has a wife and kids he wants to spend time with, and he’d rather have dinner with them than go to a Washington cocktail party. If he thought that going to a Washington cocktail party would pass his bill, he would cocktail it up all day long. But I think he’s realistic about what needs to get done to get certain pieces of legislation passed.

Gate: Is there a serious or harmful divide between the idealism of his language and the bureaucracy of presidential politics?

Favreau : I don’t think so, because I think he’s very clear-eyed in knowing that the idealism of the speeches is just that--it’s something to strive for. He’s very realistic about what is . He knows that the bureaucracy can be a pain; he knows that Congress can be partisan and gridlocked; he knows all the things that are getting in the way of passing the legislation he wants to pass. But that’s no reason to him to not speak in idealistic language and say, “Let’s reach for that. Let’s do better.” His basic philosophy can be summed up as, “We’re not going to fix everything, and not everything can be fixed, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and that doesn’t mean that if we chip away at some of these big problems, even if we don’t solve them, that’s progress.”

Gate: You were part of a White House staff that’s been frequently criticized as being too insular, too Chicago-oriented. Why does that perception exist?

Favreau : I think it persists because it’s been the perception of every president. Bush, it was that he had too much of an Austin crowd. Clinton, they were too Arkansas. Washington always tells people who come to Washington that they need more Washington people. The sheer number of former Clinton and Carter people the President has hired, people from academia, people from the business world: Tim Geithner was from the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers was a Clinton person. It’s a pretty non-Chicago crowd, actually. But whenever things are going wrong, the poll numbers are down; there are a few common tropes that Washington likes to talk about: One is, “He’s too aloof! Too insular! Need to bring in more people! Need to shake up the staff! Need to get out of Washington!”

Gate: I know you’re interested in writing screenplays. What’s so appealing about political television that would draw you away from Washington?

Favreau : So I don’t think there’s anything appealing about political TV per se. I think what’s appealing to me is that I’m always looking for ways to reach people, to inspire people about the possibilities of public service who might not necessarily be political junkies, and who might not feel that politics is for them, and who might think that the whole thing is just cynical garbage, and everyone’s in it for themselves. I think there’s many ways to do that. But one of the most interesting ways for me is entertainment and culture as a way of reaching out to people and saying, “You know what? There’s some value here, and there’s some good things being done." I was inspired by The West Wing when I was in college, and my buddy and I have thought for a long time that we’re due for a younger, campaign-related version of The West Wing that doesn’t have to do with the president and his top advisors, but has to do with all the other people, especially the young people that get involved with these things.

Gate: What was your Washington work routine like? Did you often have to stay late at the White House?

Favreau : In a lot of ways it’s just like college. When there’s a paper due, there’s nothing else you do but the paper, or a test. You lock yourself away, you procrastinate, and then suddenly you find yourself up all night. When that’s over and you don’t have anything to do the next couple days, you leave. Mine was not a job where you sat there and put in face time just because you needed to put in face time. You made sure that you did your work when there was work to do. In the White House, it was a little better than the campaign, because I had a bigger team. There were more people writing speeches, so we kind of gave each other a break when we could.

Gate: Do you have a good story about getting called back when you were out with your friends?

Favreau : [Laughs] So I was here in Chicago, and it was like two weeks before the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, and I had been up multiple nights until two or three in the morning, myself, Adam Franklin, Ben Rhodes, trying to write the Jefferson-Jackson speech. Finally we put it away for a while. And we had this speech in South Carolina that was supposed to be a year before actual election day. So we did our latest version of the Jefferson-Jackson speech there, and he gives the speech during the day on Saturday and it’s great, everything’s fine. Then I get a call at 11:30 Saturday night from Axelrod. He said, “Hey, I just talked to the President. He loved the speech today, and he said that’s what he wants the Jefferson-Jackson speech to be, except it is twenty minutes and the J-J speech needs to be ten, so can you cut it down? And he wants it by tomorrow morning.” And I had just cracked open my beer for the night, and I have all these people in my apartment. And so I run out of the house, make a cup of coffee, and I walk down Michigan Avenue, went into my office at 12 or 1 AM and stayed up all night until 10 AM and rewrote the speech.

Gate: What inner qualities can speechwriting give you?

Favreau : One of the qualities that it has taught me most of all is empathy, which is a good quality in life. As a speechwriter you need to put yourself in other people’s shoes, because you need to know what the audience would want to hear; you want to know where they’re coming from and where they are. You’re always trying to meet people where they are. I think that’s a valuable lesson to learn about life, to not judge people right away, to figure out where they’re coming from. It helps you understand the people you’re working with, the people you’re living with. It’s a very valuable tool to have, and the President is very skilled at it, and I think the best speakers and the best leaders often are.

Gate: Do you see yourself ever being a speechwriter for someone else?

Favreau : I don’t. I worked for a candidate and president I could never have dreamed of being so inspiring to me, and such a wonderful boss, and a good man to work for. And now that I’ve done that, putting as much time and sweat and energy, and so much of my life into something like that again just doesn’t seem like it would be worth it to me. If someone comes along, like another Barack Obama, who knows? But for now, there’s so much of politics that I dislike, that I don’t see myself as a political lifer. I see myself as someone who really, truly admires Barack Obama and what he’s trying to do, and I’d do anything he asks me to do. Beyond that, I have very strong views about politics that I’ll continue to share, and it’s going to be hard to shake politics out of my system completely, but putting in the effort and the years with someone else would be tough.

This interview has been edited and condensed for this publication. The featured image above of Jon Favreau speaking with President Obama in the Oval Office can be found at  the White House's official website . The image is an Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, taken on January 23, 2012. This third-party content is licensed under  Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License  and is not copyright protected.

Noah Weiland

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Jon Favreau has the world's best job

In his memoirs, the late Ted Sorensen, speech writer and close advisor to John F Kennedy, recalls that President Clinton's press secretary, Mike McCurry, once told him: "Everyone who comes to Washington wants to be you." What McCurry meant was that, decades after Sorensen had left the White House, new arrivals in the nation's capital still modelled themselves upon him, longing to be the young advisor close to an inspirational president, entrusted with the politically sacred task of turning his thoughts into words. Many have aspired to the role. But perhaps the most extraordinary example of those who have followed Sorensen's example is Jon Favreau, director of speech writing to Barack Obama - and not yet 30.

When the president makes his state visit to Britain later this month, he will deliver speeches prepared by Favreau and his team.

More broadly, as Obama strives to recover from the "shellacking" of his party in last year's midterms and prepares to seek a second term in November 2012, Favreau will be at the heart of his quest to find a language that connects with Middle America and persuades Joe Six-Pack that Obama deserves four more years in the White House.

The president has often declared his admiration for Ronald Reagan.

It is remarkable to reflect that Favreau was not even born when Reagan won the presidency. Obama himself is scarcely a senior citizen. But the wunderkind was only 15 when his future boss became a state senator in Illinois.

Favreau came of age in the high season of The West Wing , the show that did more than anything since JFK's Camelot to glamorise the life of the White House aide. For once, however, political reality has trumped political myth. When it comes to exhilaration, intellectual energy and sheer desirability, the life Favreau now leads surpasses even that led by the young guns Sam Seaborn and Josh Lyman in Martin Sheen's fictional Bartlet administration. Plucked by Obama from the life of a disillusioned DC drone - so hard up he lived off happy-hour deals in cheap Washington joints - Favreau now tours the world on Air Force One at the side of the world's most powerful man, laptop slung over his shoulder, making history as he goes. "Dude, what you're writing is going to be hung up in people's living rooms!" Bill Burton, Obama's campaign press chief, said to his young colleague as he tapped away at a draft of the inaugural address. Favreau was 27 at the time: only in show business and sport do the young experience so much pressure, power and glamour so early in life.

To understand the Obama presidency, one must understand Jon Favreau (not to be confused with his namesake, the Hollywood actor and Iron Man director). Tall, gap-toothed, recognisable by his Timberlake buzz cut, the 29-year-old is the man to whom the 44th president entrusts one of his most precious political assets: his oratory. George W Bush made hundreds of speeches, some of them very significant (the State of the Union address in 2002 that identified the "axis of evil", the West Point speech in the same year that unveiled the doctrine of pre-emptive attack). But nobody would pretend that the last president was a gifted rhetorician.

Obama, in contrast, rose to national prominence with a single speech - a tour de force delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. The punctuation marks of the thrilling presidential primaries of 2007-8 were a series of Obama speeches that frequently mesmerised and rarely disappointed. As David Axelrod, chief strategist for his presidential campaign has observed: "Barack trusts [Favreau]. And Barack doesn't trust too many folks with that - the notion of surrendering that much authority over his own words."

Second, Favreau - or "Favs", as the president calls him - personified the brazen youthfulness of the Obama campaign. It sent an unambiguous message to the world that the Democrat nominee had hired a member of the Facebook generation to be his speech writer, rather than a seasoned political professional or freelancing academic. Favreau's method was that of the student having an essay crisis. He would withdraw with his laptop to a nearby Starbucks, take off his Aviator sunglasses and pound away for hours - a process he called "crashing". Even now, more soberly dressed and with a formal White House title, at the helm of a team of six writers, he sometimes disappears to a Washington coffee shop for peace, caffeine and concentration. This, it is safe to say, is not how Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton wrote speeches for George Washington - or, for that matter, Raymond Moley, FDR's legendary speech writer, or Peggy Noonan, when she prepared Ronald Reagan's homespun addresses.

As such, Favreau has always been an unofficial mascot of the Obama phenomenon, an important anchor of the brand. It was no accident that a host of profiles of the young prodigy appeared during Obama's campaign. It did the nominee's chances no harm for it to be known that, on the night of victory in the Iowa caucuses, Favs had e-mailed his friend: "Dude, we won. Oh my God." Such stories cemented the idea that Obama was the candidate for the digital era, not just the first African-American with a serious chance of winning, but the first candidate since Bobby Kennedy truly to understand the aspirations of the young.

That scrutiny came at a cost. At a party thrown for him by his parents at their home in North Reading, Massachusetts, Favreau was photographed with a cardboard effigy of Hillary Clinton, Obama's defeated rival for the Democratic nomination, apparently groping her breast. Inevitably, the picture ended up on Facebook - forcing Favreau to make a grovelling apology to the new secretary of state.

Since then, he has cultivated a markedly lower profile. The Brownlow Report in the Thirties, which first recommended professionally staffing the White House, advised presidential aides to display "a passion for anonymity". But Favreau has not gone quite that far. He still features routinely in video clips on the official White House website, usually when the presidential entourage is on tour overseas.

His love life is always of interest to the gossip columns and celebrity websites - not least when he was linked to Ali Campoverdi, a White House aide who had once posed in lingerie for

Maxim . Last June, he and fellow Obama staffer, Tommy Vietor, were photographed shirtless in a Georgetown bar, apparently playing "beer pong" (an endlessly variable beer-drenched version of table tennis, beloved of frat boys). Favreau and Vietor denied, via "friends", that they were playing the game. But that didn't stop conservative bloggers having a field day about these young pups supposedly dragging the presidency into disrepute.

Born in June 1981 in Winchester, Massachusetts, of French-Canadian descent, Favreau took a very precocious interest in politics after his Greek-American mother, Lillian, backed Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential contest. But it was as a scholarship student majoring in political science at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, that his passion was truly ignited. Just as Obama's politics emerged from his experience as a community organiser, so Favreau was inspired by his volunteer work for welfare recipients in Worcester. He wondered "why I would regularly encounter single working mothers who could not afford food, housing or medical care, despite the fact that they worked over 40 hours a week. If the idea was to get people off welfare rolls and into jobs, why were the jobs failing to provide even the most basic standard of living? These questions led me to Washington."

As a student, he interned in the press office of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, where his talent was quickly recognised and he even helped ghostwrite some newspaper articles for Kerry himself. "This Favreau kid is really incredible," the senator's staff informed the internship organisers. Once he had graduated, he returned to Kerry's press office, which was now embroiled in a fight for the presidency. By the end of the (failed) campaign against Bush, Favreau had risen to become Kerry's top speech writer. But he was appalled by what he saw of politics in the 2004 race - the back-stabbing and divisiveness - and was ready to leave Washington for grad school. "After the Kerry campaign, after all the backbiting and nastiness, my idealism and enthusiasm for politics were crushed," he said. "I was grateful for the experience, but it was such a difficult experience, along with losing, that I was done. It took Barack to rekindle that." The first approach came from Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director, who told the disenchanted Favreau that they were looking for a speech writer. He met Gibbs and the new senator for Illinois in the cafeteria in the Dirksen building on Capitol Hill. Obama wanted to know what had got him into politics and what his "theory of speech writing" was. "I have no theory," answered Favreau. "But when I saw you at the

[2004] convention, you basically told a story about your life from beginning to end, and it was a story that fit with the larger American narrative. People applauded not because you wrote an applause line, but because you touched something in the party and the country that people had not touched before. Democrats haven't had that in a long time."

This did the trick, and "Favs" was soon an indispensable member of the team. The approach taken by Obama and his young speech writer is one of the most intimate deployed by a president and a close aide. Karl Rove was often described as "Bush's Brain".

Favreau is described by Obama himself as a "mind-reader", able not only to provide a beautifully written draft but also to "channel"

Obama, to mimic his turns of phrase, his cadences and his approach to anecdote and quotation. Typically, the two men will sit together for half an hour, as Obama talks and Favreau types everything that he says: what he calls the "download". He then reshapes it into a draft. Obama works on the draft. The process continues until the two men are content.

In the case of the inaugural address delivered on 20 January 2009, Favreau worked on a draft in Starbucks with help from three colleagues, Ben Rhodes, Adam Frankel and Sarah Hurwitz (the latter two assisted with the now-famous ending of the speech, which alluded to a message sent to the American people by Washington when the outcome of their revolution was in doubt: "Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it"). Over the weekend of 10 and 11 January, Obama sequestered himself in the Hay-Adams Hotel and redrafted the text to his satisfaction.

The fruits of the collaboration between the president and Favreau have often been sensational. Favreau is credited with Obama's most famous slogan - "Yes We Can". There have been other such encapsulations that have made their way into the political bloodstream, such as the president's call in this year's State of the Union address for a "Sputnik moment" - a technological leap forward. Much more remarkable, however, has been the high quality of Obama's oratory in general, his ability to soar as a rhetorician, deploying political arts that are traditional and rooted in the classics rather than the television and internet age.

Both he and Favreau dislike sound bites and the "laundry list" convention of the modern political speech - a long inventory of achievements - and spend much more time on "narrative" (the story a speech tells) and "naming" (the explicit identification of problems or challenges).

In the extraordinary speech written by Favreau for the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in November 2007, for instance, Obama declared that "the same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do in this election. That's why not answering questions because we are afraid our answers won't be popular, just won't do.

That's why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won't do. Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we're worried about what Mitt [Romney] or Rudy [Giuliani] might say about us just won't do." This was a lethal attack upon the focus-group-obsessed Clintons, but delivered with a grace and impact that persuaded many for the first time that Obama might just be the man.

Favreau made a similar contribution to the speech on race delivered in March 2008, after the disclosure of the anti-American ranting of Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright. "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community," the embattled candidate said. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But, Obama continued, "the profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made." Again, this is a speech that will be anthologised and studied long after the detail of the legislation that Obama enacted as president is forgotten.

Of course, speeches on the campaign trail are quite different to speeches in office. In early 2008, Hillary Clinton repeated an adage made famous by Mario Cuomo: "You campaign with poetry, but you govern with prose" - Obama's speeches were poetic, but running the country could not be achieved by pretty rhetoric alone. To an extent, her prophecy has come true: in his first year as president, Obama made 411 "speeches, comments and remarks" (according to the official categorisation), almost all of them churned out by Favreau's office. Yet few of them had much, if any, direct impact upon the president's fortunes. The fight to secure healthcare reform, the midterm elections, the ongoing battle to secure sustainable economic recovery and the December tax cuts: these are what really mattered, big, crunchy political struggles.

Before his death, Sorensen made an acute critique of Obama's governing style. "I think that [Obama is] a remarkable speaker,"

Sorensen said, "but his speeches are still largely in campaign mode." Ouch.

Does that mean Favreau is now a marginal figure? Hardly. As he struggles to find a new idiom and a fresh language with which to reconnect with Middle America, and to reach out to Republicans in Congress, Obama will turn first to his trusted wordsmith - now more than ever, in fact. As he seeks imaginative ways of understanding and explaining the Arab uprisings, he will broaden his circle of advisors, as all presidents do - but always return to his "mind-reader" for help with the words. It is in the president's nature so to do.

Look at the deftness with which Obama's State of the Union address this year presented the horrific Tucson massacre - in which 19 people were shot - as evidence not of the divisions within America, but of the urgent need to unify. "Amid all the noise and passions and rancour of our public debate, Tucson reminded us that no matter who we are or where we come from, each of us is a part of something greater - something more consequential than party or political preference. We are part of the American family. We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled."

Pure Favreau. Pure Obama. An indivisible team with a lot more to do, and one more election to win. Will they prevail? Too early to say. But I bet you that, in his head at least, in moments of caffeine-soaked exhaustion late at night, Favs is already working on the biggest speech of them all, the crowning achievement: the second inaugural address. Can he write it? Yes He Can.

Originally published in the June 2011 issue of British GQ .

Jon Favreau (speechwriter)

Jonathan Edward Favreau [1] ( / ˈ f æ v r oʊ / ; born June 2, 1981) [2] is an American political commentator, podcaster, and the former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama . [3] [4] [5]

Early life and education

Kerry campaign, obama campaign, white house director of speechwriting (2009–2013), after the white house, controversies, personal life, external links.

After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross as valedictorian, [6] Favreau worked for the John Kerry presidential campaign in 2004, working to collect talk radio news for the campaign and was promoted to the role of Deputy Speechwriter. [7] Favreau first met Barack Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, while working on the Kerry campaign.

In 2005, Obama's communications director Robert Gibbs recommended Favreau to Obama as a speechwriter. [8] Favreau was hired as Obama's speechwriter shortly after Obama's election to the United States Senate . Obama and Favreau grew close, and Obama referred to him as his "mind reader". He went on the campaign trail with Obama during his successful presidential election campaign . In 2009, he was named to the White House staff as Director of Speechwriting. [9]

In January 2017, he co-founded liberal media company Crooked Media with fellow former Obama staffers Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett , and began co-hosting the political podcast Pod Save America with Vietor, Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer . [10]

Favreau was born at Winchester Hospital and raised in nearby North Reading, Massachusetts , [2] [11] the son of Lillian ( née DeMarkis), a schoolteacher, and Mark Favreau. His father is of French Canadian descent and his mother is of Greek descent . [12] His grandfather, Robert Favreau, was a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives and described by Favreau as a " New England Republican ." [13] [14] Favreau graduated from the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross in 2003 as his class's valedictorian , [15] [16] with a degree in political science . [17]

At Holy Cross, he was treasurer and debate committee chairman for the College Democrats , and studied classical piano. [15] From 1999 to 2000, he served on the Welfare Solidarity Project, eventually becoming its director. In 2001, Favreau worked with Habitat for Humanity and a University of Massachusetts Amherst program to bring visitors to cancer patients.

In 2002, he became head of an initiative to help unemployed individuals improve their résumés and interview skills. He also earned a variety of honors in college, including the Vanicelli Award; being named the 2001 Charles A. Dana Scholar; memberships in the Political Science Honor Society, Pi Sigma Alpha , the College Honors Program, the Sociology Honor Society, Alpha Kappa Delta , and was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship in 2002. [15] He was an editor on his college newspaper, and during summers in college, he earned extra income selling newspapers as a telemarketer, while also interning in John Kerry's offices. [18]

He joined Senator John Kerry 's 2004 presidential campaign soon after graduation from the College of the Holy Cross. [3] While working for the Kerry campaign, his job was to assemble audio clips of talk radio programs for the Kerry camp to review for the next day. When the Kerry campaign began to falter at one point, they found themselves without a speechwriter, and Favreau was promoted to the role of deputy speechwriter. Following Kerry's defeat, Favreau became dispirited with politics, and was uncertain if he would do such work again. [16] Favreau first met Obama (then an Illinois State Senator running for the U.S. Senate), while still working for Kerry, backstage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention as Obama was rehearsing his keynote address . Favreau, then 23 years old, interrupted Obama's rehearsal, advising the soon-to-be-elected Senator that a rewrite was needed because Kerry wanted to use one of the lines. [18]

Obama communications aide Robert Gibbs , who had worked for Kerry's campaign, recommended Favreau to Obama as an excellent writer, and in 2005 he began working for Barack Obama in his U.S. Senate office before joining his presidential campaign as chief speechwriter in 2006. [19] His interview with Obama was on the Senator's first day. Uninterested in Favreau's résumé, Obama instead questioned Favreau on what motivated him to work in politics and his theory of writing. [16] He described this theory to Obama as, "A speech can broaden the circle of people who care about this stuff. How do you say to the average person that's been hurting: 'I hear you, I'm there?' Even though you've been so disappointed and cynical about politics in the past, and with good reason, we can move in the right direction. Just give me a chance." [20]

Favreau led a speechwriting team for the campaign that included Ben Rhodes and Cody Keenan . [18] For his work with Obama in the campaign, he would wake as early as 5   a.m., and routinely stayed up until 3 a.m. working on speeches. [18] His leadership style among other Obama speechwriters was very informal. They would often meet in a small conference room, discussing their work late into the evening over takeout food. According to Rhodes, Favreau did not drive structured meetings with agendas. "If he had, we probably would have laughed at him," Rhodes said. Favreau was planning to hire more speechwriters to assist him, but conceded he was unsure of how to manage them. According to him, "My biggest strength isn't the organization thing." [20]

He has likened his position to " Ted Williams ' batting coach", because of Obama's celebrated abilities as a speaker and writer. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said of Favreau, "Barack trusts him... And Barack doesn't trust too many folks with that—the notion of surrendering that much authority over his own words." [18] In Obama's own words, Favreau was his "mind reader". [21] He and Obama share a fierce sports rivalry between the Boston Red Sox , favored by Favreau, and the Chicago White Sox , favored by Obama. [2] When the White Sox defeated the Red Sox 3–0 in the 2005 American League playoffs , Obama swept off Favreau's desk with a small broom. [18] During the campaigns, he was obsessed with election tracking polls, jokingly referring to them as his "daily crack". At points during the campaign, he felt overwhelmed by his responsibilities and would turn to Axelrod and his friends for advice. [20]

Favreau has declared that the speeches of Robert F. Kennedy and Michael Gerson have influenced his work, [22] and has expressed admiration for Peggy Noonan 's speechwriting, citing a talk given by Ronald Reagan at Pointe du Hoc as his favorite Noonan speech. Gerson also admires Favreau's work, and sought him out at an Obama New Hampshire campaign rally to speak with the younger speechwriter. [23] Favreau was the primary writer of Obama's inauguration address of January 2009. The Guardian describes the process as follows:

"The inaugural speech has shuttled between them [Obama and Favreau] four or five times, following an initial hour-long meeting in which the President-elect spoke about his vision for the address, and Favreau took notes on his computer. Favreau then went away and spent weeks on research. His team interviewed historians and speechwriters, studied periods of crisis, and listened to past inaugural orations. When ready, he took up residence in a Starbucks in Washington and wrote the first draft." [21]

When President Obama assumed office in 2009, Favreau was appointed Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting. [3] He became the second-youngest chief White House speechwriter on record, after James Fallows . [19] His salary was $172,200 a year. [24]

Favreau has said his work with Obama will be his final job in the realm of politics, saying, "Anything else would be anticlimactic." [25] In regard to his post-political future, he said, "Maybe I'll write a screenplay, or maybe a fiction book based loosely on what all of this was like. You had a bunch of kids working on this campaign together, and it was such a mix of the serious and momentous and just the silly ways that we are. For people in my generation, it was an unbelievable way to grow up." [20]

In March 2013, Favreau left the White House, along with Tommy Vietor , to pursue a career in private sector consulting and screenwriting. [26] [22] Together, they founded the communications firm Fenway Strategies. From 2013 to 2016, Favreau wrote sporadically for the Daily Beast . [27] In 2016, after the November presidential election was won by Donald Trump , Favreau, Vietor and Jon Lovett founded Crooked Media . Favreau co-hosts Crooked's premier political podcast Pod Save America with Dan Pfeiffer , Vietor and Lovett. In the wake of the new Republican healthcare bill, the AHCA , he coined the term "Wealthcare".

He currently serves on the Board of Advisors of Let America Vote , a voting rights organization founded by fellow Crooked Media host Jason Kander . [28]

Favreau was named one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time magazine in 2009. [29] In the same year he was ranked 33rd in the GQ "50 Most Powerful in D.C." and featured in the Vanity Fair "Next Establishment" list. [30] [31] Favreau was one of several Obama administration members in the 2009 "World's Most Beautiful People" issue of People magazine. [32] Executive Producer for the podcast This Land , and was nominated for a 2021 Peabody Award .

On December 5, 2008, a picture of Favreau grabbing the breast of a cardboard cut-out of then-Senator Hillary Clinton was posted on Facebook. [33] Clinton had recently been announced as Obama's nominee for U.S. Secretary of State . [34] Favreau called Senator Clinton's staff to offer an apology. The senator's office responded by joking that "Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon's obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application." [35] [36] [22]

In June 2010, the website FamousDC obtained a picture of Favreau along with Assistant White House Press Secretary Tommy Vietor, playing beer pong after taking off their shirts at a restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. [37] This event attracted criticism from the press because of its timing during the height of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill . [38] [39] [40]

He is the older brother of Andy Favreau, a professional TV and movie actor. [41] On May 23, 2014, Favreau was awarded an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree by his alma mater, Holy Cross, where he also gave the commencement address. [42] On June 17, 2017, Favreau married Emily Black, daughter of federal Judge Timothy Black , at her family's vacation home in Biddeford Pool , Maine . [43] Their son, Charlie, was born in August 2020. [44] [45] Jon and his wife have had their second son, Teddy, in December 2023. [46]

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• 1 2 3 Parker, Ashley (December 5, 2008). "The New Team – Jonathan Favreau" . The New York Times . Retrieved June 3, 2009 .
• 1 2 3 "President-Elect Barack Obama names two new White House staff members" . The Office of the President-Elect . Archived from the original on November 26, 2008 . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• ↑ d'Ancona, Matthew (December 6, 2012). "Jon Favreau has the world's best job" . GQ . Retrieved December 16, 2016 .
• ↑ Jaffe, Greg (July 24, 2016). "Washington Post: Which Obama speech is one for the history books?" . Concord Monitor . Retrieved January 29, 2019 .
• ↑ "Unseen but heard – Meet Obama's speechwriter" . Georgian Journal . January 18, 2013 . Retrieved January 29, 2019 .
• ↑ "Three lessons in storytelling" (PDF) . NIMD . Retrieved January 29, 2010 .
• ↑ Glenn, Cheryl (2011). The Harbrace Guide to Writing, Concise . Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. ISBN   9780495913993 .
• ↑ "The Complete Obama Speech Archive" . Archived from the original on May 18, 2010 . Retrieved July 18, 2010 .
• ↑ Rutenberg, Jim (March 20, 2017). "Opposition and a Shave: Former Obama Aides Counter Trump" . The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved March 22, 2017 .
• ↑ Jon Favreau [@jonfavs] (December 28, 2017). "Born in Winchester hospital, grew up in NR" ( Tweet ) – via Twitter .
• ↑ Marchese, John (December 28, 2009). "Obama's Ghost – Jon Favreau – Obama's Speechwriter" . Boston Magazine . Archived from the original on December 12, 2013 . Retrieved October 11, 2013 .
• ↑ "Obama speechwriter has deep New Hampshire roots" . New Hampshire Union Leader . January 24, 2012 . Retrieved May 18, 2019 .
• ↑ Johnson, Eric (November 12, 2016). "Full transcript: 'Keepin' It 1600' co-host Jon Favreau on Recode Media" . Vox . Retrieved May 18, 2019 . My grandfather was a Republican state rep in New Hampshire way back in the day.
• 1 2 3 Kittredge, Dan (March 28, 2003). "Favreau named valedictorian" . The Holy Cross Crusader. Archived from the original on January 30, 2009 . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• 1 2 3 Wolffe, Richard (January 6, 2008). "In His Candidate's Voice" . Newsweek . Archived from the original on June 7, 2008 . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• ↑ Walsh, Kenneth T. (February 23, 2009). "Jon Favreau: Obama's Mind Reader Prepares for Congressional Address" . U.S. News & World Report . Retrieved October 13, 2009 .
• 1 2 3 4 5 6 Parker, Ashley (January 20, 2008). "What Would Obama Say?" . The New York Times . Retrieved January 25, 2009 .
• 1 2 Fallows, James (December 18, 2008). "I am shocked to see a factual error in today's Washington Post!" . The Atlantic . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• 1 2 3 4 Saslow, Eli (December 18, 2008). "Helping to Write History" . The Washington Post . Retrieved February 2, 2009 .
• 1 2 Pilkington, Ed (January 20, 2009). "Obama inauguration: Words of history ... crafted by 27-year-old in Starbucks" . The Guardian . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• 1 2 3 Walker, Tim (February 6, 2013). "Jon Favreau: From White House to silver screen" . The Independent . Archived from the original on June 14, 2022 . Retrieved January 29, 2019 .
• ↑ Warren, Mark (December 3, 2008). "What Obama's 27-Year-Old Speechwriter Learned From George W. Bush" . Esquire . Retrieved January 31, 2009 .
• ↑ "2010 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff" . The Obama White House . Retrieved September 23, 2010 – via National Archives .
• ↑ Philp, Catherine (January 19, 2009). "Profile: Barack Obama's speechwriter Jon Favreau" . The Times . London . Retrieved January 31, 2009 .
• ↑ Jan, Tracy (March 3, 2013). "Leaving West Wing to pursue Hollywood dream" . Boston Globe . Retrieved January 19, 2015 .
• ↑ "Jon Favreau profile" . The Daily Beast . April 22, 2016.
• ↑ "Advisors" . Let America Vote . Retrieved May 1, 2018 .
• ↑ "The 2009 TIME 100 – Scientists & Thinkers: Jon Favreau" . Time . April 30, 2009. Archived from the original on May 2, 2009 . Retrieved September 23, 2010 .
• ↑ Draper, Robert; Naddaf, Raha; Goldstein, Sarah; Hylton, Wil S.; Kirby, Mark; Veis, Greg; Newmyer, Tory (October 12, 2009). "The 50 Most Powerful in D.C." GQ . Retrieved September 23, 2010 .
• ↑ Pressman, Matt; Bitici, Val; Gaffney, Adrienne (October 8, 2009). "The Next Establishment 2009" . Vanity Fair . Retrieved September 23, 2010 .
• ↑ "100 Most Beautiful: Barack's Beauties" . People . May 11, 2009 . Retrieved September 23, 2010 .
• ↑ "Obama speechwriter Favreau learns the perils of Facebook" . CNN . December 6, 2008 . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• ↑ Schor, Elana (December 1, 2008). "Barack Obama nominates Hillary Clinton to the state department – as it happened" . The Guardian . ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved December 5, 2019 .
• ↑ Schlesinger, Robert (December 12, 2008). "Barack Obama Speechwriter Jon Favreau, the Hillary Clinton "Grope" and Scenes From the Surveillance Republic" . U.S. News & World Report . Retrieved February 2, 2009 .
• ↑ Brown, Campbell (December 5, 2008). "Commentary: Clinton changes her tune on sexism" . CNN . Retrieved January 27, 2009 .
• ↑ Nolongerfamous (June 7, 2010). "WHITE HOUSE GONE WILD: Shirtless Favreau And Vietor's Sunday/Funday Beer Pong Match" . Famous DC . Retrieved December 31, 2010 .
• ↑ Harris, John; Cogan, Marin (June 10, 2010). "Are Obama staffers overexposed?" . Politico . Retrieved December 31, 2010 .
• ↑ "A straight shooter, who isn't afraid to occasionally reveal the White House's fratty side" . MSNBC . Archived from the original on December 31, 2010 . Retrieved December 31, 2010 .
• ↑ Gibson, John (June 9, 2010). "White House Parties As Gulf Coast Suffers" . New York Post . Retrieved December 31, 2010 .
• ↑ Davis, Noah (December 1, 2017). "Actor Andy Favreau on His Way-Famous Brother and New Show with Mindy Kaling" . Best Life . Retrieved November 7, 2022 .
• ↑ "2014 Commencement Address - Jon Favreau" . College of the Holy Cross . Archived from the original on May 27, 2014 . Retrieved May 26, 2014 .
• ↑ Price Olsen, Anna (July 4, 2017). "Jon Favreau's Summer Wedding in Maine" . Brides . Retrieved July 25, 2017 .
• ↑ Emily Favreau [@ebfavs] (March 14, 2020). "Social distancing for FOUR in our house! Baby boy Favs coming August 2020! 💙" . Retrieved November 7, 2022 – via Instagram .
• ↑ Jon Favreau [@jonfavs] (July 24, 2020). "Few Notes" ( Tweet ) . Retrieved November 7, 2022 – via Twitter .
• ↑ Pod Save America (August 17, 2023). Jen Psaki Reacts to Donald Trump's New Indictment and Ron DeSantis' Debate Strategy . YouTube .
• Jon Favreau collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Jon Favreau's valedictory address at College of the Holy Cross
• Leaving West Wing to pursue Hollywood dream , Tracy Jan, The Boston Globe , March 3, 2013

Jon Favreau

Speechwriter for president obama.

TRANSCRIPT: JON FAVREAU INTERVIEW

OBAMA: IN PURSUIT OF A MORE PERFECT UNION

Jon Favreau working on a speech with President Barack Obama.

Jon Favreau is a political commentator, podcaster and the former Director of Speechwriting for President Barack Obama. Favreau first began writing for Obama in 2005 during his first term as a US Senator and held the role as head speechwriter throughout the 2008 campaign and presidency, until 2013. During Obama’s presidency, Favreau became the second-youngest chief White House speechwriter on record. Over the course of eight years, Favreau had a hand in crafting nearly every major speech Obama delivered. In 2017, a few years after leaving the White House, Favreau co-founded Crooked Media, where he is a co-host of Pod Save America and the host of The Wilderness.

"Half the people think I write Obama's speeches; the other half think I'm on 'Entourage.' So I'm at the level of fame where people kind of know who I am, but they confuse me with other people."  Jon Favreau

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Read Jon Favreau’s Full Commencement Address to College of the Holy Cross

Eleven years after delivering the valedictory address as a graduating senior, Obama’s former speechwriter returned to his alma mater to speak to the Class of 2014. Read the full speech.

Jon Favreau

College of the Holy Cross/Facebook

President Boroughs, Members of the Board of Trustees, honored guests, faculty, family, friends, and the Class of 2014:

I’m so grateful and honored for the chance to share this day with you. Jeff, you gave an outstanding valedictory address. And unlike the speech I delivered in 2003, you managed to finish without describing people who solve problems as “Boo-Boo Fixers.” Yeah, that’s the kind of thing that follows you around for life. Really, my friends made T-shirts.

Since then, I’ve marginally improved my use of metaphor and spent the last decade working as a speechwriter , which means that not a spring has passed where I haven’t helped with somebody else’s commencement address. I say this less as a point of pride than a friendly warning: I have now trafficked in every cliché and life lesson known to man. I am like a human search engine of sentimental quotes and anecdotes. And if there are times today when I sound a bit too much like a middle-aged black man from Chicago, all I can say is that old habits die hard.

Of course, this commencement is very different for me—and very special. Eleven years later, I still have vivid memories of what it felt like to sit where you are right now. I especially recall the feeling I had after this ceremony was over, when my roommates and I took a long, rainy walk down Southbridge Street to the three-story tenement we called home. Actually, we called it the Crackhouse, a name we convinced our parents came from a large crack in the foundation. Honestly, the house didn’t even have a foundation. It barely had walls.

For the rest of that afternoon, as the 12 of us packed up our rooms for the last time, we barely spoke—and that’s because none of us had answers to the questions on everyone’s mind: What now? Where do we go from here? How are we supposed to figure out what to do with our lives? And how will anything top the experience we just had together?

Now, some of you might be sitting here today with a very detailed plan and no anxiety whatsoever. I want you to know that I find you annoying but wish you the best of luck. For the rest of you, I come bearing three quick pieces of advice—advice I offer as someone who has safely and happily made it to the other side of 30 with everything I could’ve hoped for except the grandchildren my mother keeps asking for. I can actually see her nodding her head from here.

My first piece of advice is about your career. A mentor of mine once told me there are two kinds of people: people who want to be something, and people who want to do something. For a long time, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t love studying law, and it wasn’t really my strong suit, but lawyers seemed important, impressive, and successful—three things I also wanted to be.

Law school was my plan until about 12 hours before Holy Cross graduation, when I received an offer to be the press office assistant on John Kerry’s presidential campaign for a salary of $20,000 a year. Now, I didn’t really want to be anyone’s assistant, nor did I want to be someone who made $20,000 a year. But the job involved writing, and writing was something I loved to do. It also involved campaigning, which was something I wanted to do. So two weeks later, I moved into a dingy basement apartment on Capitol Hill in a city where I had only one friend. It was the best decision of my life.

Plenty of considerations go into choosing a job, and sometimes the most important is simply the fact that you receive an offer and a salary that will pay off your loans. But the chase to be something—to be rich, famous, powerful, praised—that is a race without a finish line, because there will always be more money to make, or a fancier title to pursue, or a higher accolade to achieve. In my experience, you are far more likely to find lasting fulfillment if these fleeting pleasures are the byproduct of a decision to do something—something that interests you; something you’re good at; something your gut is just begging you to try.

Now, this advice comes with an important disclaimer: Just because a career is fulfilling doesn’t mean it will always be fun. I may never again be blessed with a job that brings me as much satisfaction as the one I had writing speeches for President Obama. I may also never have a job that I complain about as much. And long before I was hanging around the Oval Office, I was taking lunch orders in a press office, changing the batteries in people’s BlackBerrys, and compiling news clippings at 4 a.m. Once, as part of a campaign stunt to protest “Republican trash attacks,” I had to walk out from behind a Dumpster wearing a giant garbage bag, which made for an enjoyable segment on the news that night. Don’t bother trying to find the footage—my friends have been looking for years.

The point is, don’t let this fancy new degree fool you into thinking you’re somehow above the very menial and tedious work that the most rewarding careers often require—especially when you first start out. Older people who think they know better have labeled this generation entitled. Do us all a favor and prove them wrong.

My second piece of advice is about the people in your life. One of the most beautiful stories you’ll ever read is the interview the Telegram & Gazette did with Celtics legend and fellow Crusader Bob Cousy , shortly after his wife of 63 years passed away. Looking back on his younger, busier days, The Cooz said: “I thought putting a ball in a hole was important…I was always working. So Missie and I had the best and most romantic part of our marriage at the end. We literally held hands for the last 20 years.”

After a decade on the campaign trail and in the White House, the biggest regrets I have aren’t professional. I don’t stay up at night thinking about the bad speech reviews, or the time I put an awful joke about spilled milk in the State of the Union . What I regret is missing my buddy’s wedding right before the election. What I regret is not getting on the first plane out of D.C. the time my dad was really sick. I regret when I forgot to call home or catch up with an old friend. And while I’m pretty happy about today’s honor, I’m even happier it gave so many people I love and miss an excuse to get together again.

In a world on permanent hyperdrive, the pressure to succeed in your career will come from everywhere. The pressure to succeed in your friendships and relationships has to come from you. YOU have to return the calls and the emails and schedule the visits. YOU have to put away the distractions and be present in the lives of the people you love. And the older you get, the more you realize that this is the best, most important work you’ll ever do.

My final piece of advice is about the world you’re going to change. A few weeks ago, I was proud to see the NBC Nightly News profile the students who’ve taken part in Working for Worcester, a project that has helped rebuild lives and neighborhoods throughout this city. I was also reminded how painfully rare it is to come across a news story about the selfless devotion that quietly motivates so many people in so many places around the globe.

Never forget that such devotion exists. Never lose the palpable faith in human progress that is the greatest gift of a Jesuit education from Holy Cross. I understand that cynicism can seem like a logical response to the daily flood of headlines about problems that can’t be solved and people who behave badly—the celebrities and CEOs and politicians of both parties who are supposedly driven only by ego and greed and personal gain. It is hardly original to point out that trust in major institutions has declined, as more of their mistakes and deficiencies are revealed and reported and endlessly analyzed. But here’s the truth: So long as institutions like government, media, business, and faith are created by human beings, with all our faults and imperfections, they will frustrate us. They will disappoint us. They will let us down.

Cynicism is one response to this reality. If you want, you can approach the world with constant distrust and suspicion. You can be a critic who just throws rocks from the sidelines, which requires very little effort or creativity. Or you can disengage from the public debate altogether, leaving the big decisions about your future and your children’s future to somebody else.

But remember: Cynicism isn’t the only response to humanity’s inadequacies and limitations. Cynicism is a choice. It is just as much of a choice as service to others or faith in God. It is just as much of a choice as love—love that bears all things, believes all things, endures all things, hopes all things.

My wish today is that you choose to hope—hard and risky as it may be. My wish is that you choose to give others the same presumption of good faith that you want to be given. My wish is that despite all the sound and logical reasons not to, you choose to try.

The world beyond these gates is marked by too much suffering and need; it is challenged by too much inequality, and violence, and degradation. But it is also a world where fewer people are dying young, and more people are living longer. It is a world with less hunger, less poverty, and less deadly disease than at any time in history. It is a world with fewer nations at war and more democracies protecting more people’s basic human rights. It is a world where there are more girls in school, more adults who can read, more Americans graduating from high school, and yes, more of our citizens with health care.

All of these trends are real, and none are the result of vague forces or happy accidents. People made this progress. People chose to make this progress—many people, working many years. People in governments and nonprofits. People with great power and wealth, and people with very little of either. People who, despite all of their flaws and failings and shortcomings, decided to press forward with determination and honest effort, believing that there must be an upward trajectory to our divine and humble journey.

Life is a wonderful struggle. And the downside of getting advice from a 32-year-old is that I haven’t come close to figuring it out. There are days when I feel like I’m still standing in the Crackhouse, surrounded by boxes. I still wonder if I’m focused on what I want to do instead of what I want to be. I still wonder if I’m making enough time for the people I love. And every time I turn on the news, I fight the urge to be cynical. But in those moments, I often think about one of the most inspiring things I’ve experienced since leaving these gates.

It was the night of the 2008 election, but it wasn’t the moment they called the race for Barack Obama. It was earlier, as I was making edits to that night’s speech . The draft ended with a story we found about a woman from Atlanta named Ann Nixon Cooper, who had waited in line for three hours that day just her to cast ballot. And what made the story so special was the fact that Ann Nixon Cooper was 106 years old, born at a time when she wasn’t allowed to vote for two reasons—because she was a woman and because she was African-American.

As the election results started looking good, my friend pointed out that we should probably call Ann Nixon Cooper and let her know that she’s about to get a bit of a shout-out. So we find her number, and I tell this frail, lovely woman that a man who’s about to become the first black president of the United States wants to mention her in his victory speech.

There was a pause on the line, and I began to think about all that Ms. Cooper endured through a century marked by war and depression; brutal prejudice and discrimination; a century where she patiently pressed on as a tutor and a church volunteer and a civil rights activist; as a wife, and a mother, and a grandmother; a century where she somehow lived to see progress she must have only dreamed about as a child: women’s rights and voting rights and civil rights for all.

And just then Ann Nixon Cooper interrupted my thoughts with an important question about that night’s speech: “Will it be on television?” I told her yes, it would be on television. So she thought about that, paused for a while longer, and asked, “Which channel will it be on?” And I said “All the channels!” Then she said, “I’m so proud. I’m so happy. Finally.” And at that point, she started to cry. And I did, too. And right at that moment, they called Ohio, the race was over, everyone started cheering, and I hid under my desk so I could talk to Ann Nixon Cooper for a few more minutes.

Life is a wonderful struggle. And we are all very lucky that this special place on a hill has prepared us to live it well—with grace, love, patience, and above all, hope.

Congratulations to the Class of 2014, and may you be blessed with all the happiness and success the world has to offer.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

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Can We Ask You Some Questions, Jon Favreau?

Jon Favreau '03, Hon. '14, Obama speechwriter and co-host of "Pod Save America," answers the HCM Questionnaire.

Just two years after graduating from Holy Cross, Jon Favreau ’03, Hon. ’14, became head speechwriter for then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. When Obama took office as president, Favreau became the second-youngest chief presidential speechwriter in White House history. In 2009, TIME magazine named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Favreau went on to co-found Crooked Media, a media company where he and three other former Obama aides co-host “Pod Save America,” a political conversation podcast. As he prepared for the June 2024 release of his new book with Crooked Media’s co-founders, “Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps,” Favreau answered our burning questions on everything from his go-to coffee order to what threatens our democracy today — and how to save it.

FIRST, A FEW QUESTIONS ABOUT YOU, JON

Where did you grow up? 

North Reading, Massachusetts.

Where do you consider “home”?

I still can’t believe I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 10 years now, but I’d say it definitely feels like home.

When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up? I alternated between writer, lawyer, journalist and politician — so I guess it’s not too surprising where I finally landed.

What profession other than your own would you like to try?

During my freshman year at Holy Cross, when I was taking music theory and playing a lot of piano, I thought I might try to play professionally. Piano is still one of the only non-political things I do to relax.

What profession would you not like to try?

I would be absolutely terrible at anything finance-related.

What is the first thing you do when you wake up?

Check my phone, open Twitter, go to Starbucks.

Top three most-used apps on your phone?

Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp.

How do you relax?

I’ll let you know when it happens.

What is something you can’t do but wish you could?

Quit social media.

What movie or TV show do you wish you could watch again for the first time?

“Succession.”

What is one item you must have on you at all times?

My phone is truly another appendage.

During your time at The White House, did you get to do any walk-and-talks like viewers saw on “The West Wing”?

No, though there were lots of sit-and-talks in windowless basement offices.

What is your go-to coffee order?

Woof, get ready: large iced French vanilla Dunkin’ Donuts with milk and Splenda. I know, it’s bad.

Call or text?

Text! Haven’t answered a call in years.

ON PRESIDENTIAL SPEECHWRITING

What moment would you most like to relive from your time working as speechwriter for former President Obama?

The night of the 2008 election.

What was the most surprising part about speechwriting for Obama?

How patient and collaborative he was — never lost his temper, never dismissed my suggestions out of hand, always willing to take suggestions, even as he was most always confident about what he wanted to say. 

You’ve said you knew a speech was good when it came back covered in edits. What kinds of edits would the president make?

He would frequently add entire arguments I’d left out, sometimes adding a full page to the speech. As the speech got closer to the final draft, he’d change a lot of individual words and edit sentences for rhythm and flow as much as anything else.

What is the best writing tip he gave you?

Always think about the story you’re trying to tell.

What part of working at Obama’s White House do you miss the most?

The camaraderie with other colleagues, who in some cases had been friends for years.

Favorite speech you wrote during that time?

The second inaugural address.

You have said the most important thing Obama taught you was to believe, no matter what, in the possibilities of American democracy. What is the promise of democracy, and why is it worth saving?

Not sure if I’m supposed to give you guys an exclusive excerpt from the book, but here goes: 

“The work of democracy is never over. And that’s a feature, not a bug. For centuries, there was nothing in the world like this. People organized themselves through power and violence. And then one day, people decided to take a chance on each other – on a government by the many, not the few, organized by laws, not kings.

Turns out, that’s a tough thing to pull off. At best, democracy is messy, contentious, and infuriating. Change will be slow because convincing a big group of people to do anything is slow. Have you ever watched a table for 12 try to order at a restaurant? It’s a nightmare.

But here’s the amazing part. Democracy isn’t just how we organize our government. It’s a way to see ourselves. In deciding that we are in charge – that we have agency – we are also deciding that each of us matters and deserves a voice, that all of us are worthy of dignity and respect. In empowering us, democracy changes us.”

ON WRITING, IN GENERAL

You’ve said speeches should tell a story. What makes a compelling story?

A story that makes you feel empathy and inspires you to think or act differently as a result.

What are your top three favorite speeches of all time?

MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech, LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech and RFK’s “Mindless Menace of Violence” speech. I think all three of them together tell an essential story about America — an imperfect union that can still be made better.

What word would you like to do away with?

When is your preferred time to write?

Late at night (though I can rarely stay up past 10 p.m. most nights) or on a flight with no Wi-Fi (that isn’t turbulent).

Favorite line you’ve ever written?

“In the unlikely story that is America, there’s never been anything false about hope.”

Ideal speech font, font size?

Times New Roman, 12pt.

ON “DEMOCRACY OR ELSE: HOW TO SAVE AMERICA IN 10 EASY STEPS”

Your new book, “Democracy or Else: How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps,” with Crooked Media’s co-founders and hosts of “Pod Save America” comes out in June. Who should read it?

Anyone who wants to get more involved in politics and organizing on any issue at every level. Whether you’re a political junkie or someone who barely votes, I think you’ll find some useful advice about how to participate in politics in a way that feels less scary, more fun and hopefully more impactful. 

If it won’t spoil anything, can you share your favorite step of the “10 Easy Steps”?

Step 7: Give Yourself A Break (really!).

What is the greatest threat to American democracy today?

Same as it ever was: selfishness and cynicism; ignorance and indifference.

ON CROOKED MEDIA AND “POD SAVE AMERICA”

What is the best part of co-hosting “Pod Save America”?

I get to talk about something I really care about with people I really care about.

What is the most challenging part of co-hosting “Pod Save America”?

Have you seen the news lately?

Dream podcast guest?

Taylor Swift.

Where do you get your news?

Almost anywhere you could think of.

How do you recommend Americans today consume news?

I wouldn’t (kidding!). Read fact-checked, well-sourced journalism. Read the whole piece, not just the headline or the tweet or whatever 30-second clip you see on social media. If something seems surprising or enraging or too wild to be true, look for another source. Consume more news and less opinion. And do it all in moderation (advice to myself that I can’t seem to take).

ON ALMA MATER

What made you choose Holy Cross?

My first visit to campus — it just felt like the right place. Also, to be completely honest: My best friend from high school was going, and I got an academic scholarship.

How do you think you are different because of your education from Holy Cross?

What I value most about my Holy Cross education is that our professors exposed us to different points of view, taught us how to debate and disagree with empathy, and made sure we knew that the purpose of education isn’t just to improve our own lives, but to improve the lives of others.

What experience from the Washington Semester Program sticks out in your memory?

The first time I got to write a draft of an op-ed for Sen. John Kerry as a press intern. It’s when I knew I wanted to be a speechwriter.

What was the most impactful course you took at Holy Cross and who taught it?

Sociology 101 – The Sociological Perspective, with Professor Mary Erdmans.

You served as the opinion editor of The Crusader (now The Spire ) student newspaper. What advice would you give the staff today?

Write your opinion pieces with the goal of persuading someone who you know will disagree with your take. The point is not to make yourself feel good about how right you are — it’s to get other people to see things your way.

What is your favorite Holy Cross tradition?

Spring Weekend — is that still fun?

What is your favorite spot on campus?

Kimball — I could’ve sat at brunch on the weekends and avoided walking up that hill forever.

Favorite Worcester spots?

I honestly don’t think any of them exist anymore — Yong Shing, Cactus Pete’s, Plantation Club, Road Runner Pizza, a BYOB Mexican place that I’m blanking on (Tortilla Sam’s).

AND, FINALLY

Who or what inspires you?

I absolutely would’ve cringed and rolled my eyes at this four years ago, but: our two sons, Charlie and Teddy. Parenting is incredibly exhausting and humbling, but also the most fulfilling challenge I’ve ever had, because when you’re trying to raise good humans, you’re constantly inspired to be a better human yourself.

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?

From David Axelrod: There are two kinds of people — people who want to be something and people who want to do something. Strive to become the second kind of person

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For Decades, Holy Cross’ Washington Semester Program Has Given Students Rare Opportunities

Jon Favreau

WSB Exclusive Speaker

Founder, Crooked Media, Host of Pod Save America; Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting for President Barack Obama (2009-2013)

A mastermind in crafting the most evocative and unforgettable speeches of our time, Jon Favreau, shares his insights and experiences from working alongside the President and provides inspiration to future leaders entering lives of public service.

Jon Favreau'S SPEAKING FEE Under $25,000

Presidents’ words can move people, persuade a country and define their place in history. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Speech is power.” President Barack Obama’s director of speechwriting, Jon Favreau, not only rose to the challenge of being the second-youngest chief speechwriter in White House history but crafted some of the most evocative and unforgettable speeches of our time, unleashing the voice of a new generation. Considered one of the President’s most trusted and influential staffers, often referred to as his “mind reader,” Favreau played an indispensable role in the development—and success—of his most pivotal speeches. He began working with then-Senator Obama in 2005 as his speechwriter and transitioned to the 2008 presidential campaign. From the iconic “Yes We Can” 2008 New Hampshire primary night speech to the historic inaugural addresses of 2009 and 2013, Favreau’s work captured the historical significance of Barack Obama’s presidency, while connecting the zeitgeist of a nation with the message of its leader. Featured in TIME magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and in GQ’s “50 Most Powerful People in D.C.,” Favreau is the co-founder of communications firm, Fenway Strategies, co-host of one of America’s most popular podcasts, Keepin’ It 1600 , and a columnist for The Ringer . Providing audiences with an intimate glimpse of his experiences in the White House, Favreau shares his unique insights that will compel future leaders in their fields to reach their full potential.

Featured Videos

Jon Favreau and Wesley Morris on the 2016 Election

Jon Favreau | Life as Obama’s Speechwriter

Jon Favreau (May 9, 2016) | Charlie Rose

Jon Favreau’s Speech Topics

The journey into a life of public service.

When Jon Favreau—director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama (2009-2013)—joined the White House at age 27, he became the second-youngest chief speechwriter in United States history. Sharing illuminating anecdotes from a career spent working alongside the Commander in Chief on the two most pivotal presidential campaigns in recent history, in the West Wing and throughout the world, Favreau conveys his own life experiences, his aspirations to balance idealism with the reality of politics and insights to inspire others to consider public service and develop their skills as future leaders.

Words Matter: Storytelling with President Obama in an Age of Sound Bites

The significance of meaningful and effective words cannot be overrated, especially when a critical message is needed to stand out in a 24/7 news cycle and break through the constant noise of social media.  Jon Favreau—director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama (2009-2013)—knows this all too well as he has worked on some of the most important communications coming from the OvalOffice.  According to Obama chief advisor David Axelrod, he has had his “stamp on all the great speeches from 2005 to early 2013” and always sought to tell a compelling story rather than string together a collection of sound bites. However, it is not simply a sheer talent with words that has made Favreau a success. While his rhetorical prowess has played a role, what sets Favreau above the rest is his unique ability to “see” or get behind the words—to capture the essence of an issue and create dialogue that clearly and powerfully articulates what it is about that issue that matters and why we should care. As former right-hand man and “mind reader” to arguably one of the greatest orators in United States history, Favreau offers his audiences valuable insight on how precisely—from conception to delivery—to “get behind the words we speak.” In the process, he discusses the significance of “mining” resources for inspiration, creating scripts that speak from and to the heart and “walking the walk” of talk.

What other organizations say about Jon Favreau

Jon Favreau is such an amazing person! Today was one of the most beautiful graduations that Greengates has ever had. Our students, teachers and parents were more than impressed. Jon’s speech was perfect, he was perfect! Education Programs

Jon Favreau was fantastic and a huge hit with our crowd! I think everyone was impressed with how smart and down-to-earth he is. He was incredibly gracious to take pictures and chat with several speechwriters before his presentation. Publishing

Thank you so much for your work to make the Jon Favreau lecture possible! We had a fantastic experience, and the students in attendance really enjoyed his speech. Jon was very engaging with our students at dinner and the reception following the lecture, and they are still talking about how much they liked him! Universities & Colleges

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Ex-Obama Speechwriter Jon Favreau Explains Origins of the Stump Speech

President Obama's ex-speechwriter talks about one of the campaign basics.

— -- One man who knows a thing or two about stump speeches is Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

Favreau, 35, got his start working for John Kerry's failed presidential campaign in 2004 and met Obama during the Democratic National Convention that year. Favreau went on to work for Obama when he was a senator and played a pivotal role in his 2008 election and the first years of his administration.

The stump speech is a campaign tool that Favreau — and every other presidential speechwriter — knows well.

"These speeches are their argument for why they should be president," he said.

Part of the beauty of a stump speech is that it "can be reused again and again, anytime, anywhere," Favreau said.

Learn more about the utility and history of the stump speech in the video above.

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• Barack Obama

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Jon Favreau, President Obama’s head speechwriter, is departing

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WASHINGTON — Jon Favreau’s career took off when, at age 23, he interrupted U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama during a speech rehearsal to offer some suggestions for improvement.

That cheeky move led to a seven-year tour as Obama’s lead speechwriter, an assignment that ends March 1 as Favreau considers trying his hand at another form of drama — as a screenwriter, perhaps in Los Angeles.

The departure subtracts a vivid personality from the president’s operation, defined since the beginning by Obama’s spoken words and the team that wrote them.

After Favreau landed in the White House four years ago, he became the most recognizable in a coterie of young staffers. Sporting aviator sunglasses and a buzz cut, he occasionally lit up social media with his antics.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

People magazine named him one of the world’s most beautiful people. He went out with actress Rashida Jones, best known for her role in “The Office.” One night, as he and some friends played a shirtless game of beer pong in Georgetown, someone snapped a photo that ended up on the blog FamousDC, with the headline: “White House Gone Wild.”

But about the writing, Favreau was always serious, telling peers it was a solemn responsibility to remain in sync with the president’s thinking.

“When they’re working together, it’s like watching two musicians riff,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime advisor. “Jon’s stamp is on all of the great speeches, from 2005 until now.”

Favreau will turn over his seat to Cody Keenan, a Chicago native who is taking the lead on writing the State of the Union address. Keenan is an original member of the team of twentysomethings that Favreau assembled for a tough assignment: writing for a writer with exacting standards.

Favreau declined Monday to discuss his departure.

PHOTOS: Armed presidents

In a statement, Obama said, “He has become a friend and a collaborator on virtually every major speech I’ve given in the Senate, on the campaign trail and in the White House.”

They didn’t start off as collaborators. Obama was an Illinois state senator running for the U.S. Senate when they met in 2004. He was preparing to deliver the Democratic National Convention speech that would launch his national career. Favreau was working as a junior speechwriter for the party’s presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who is from Favreau’s home state.

Kerry’s staff had spotted an overlap between Obama’s speech and the one their boss planned to deliver, and they sent Favreau to tell Obama to trim his text.

“It was an unbelievably cruel thing to do, to send the 23-year-old in to do that job,” Axelrod joked.

After Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, he hired Favreau. Favreau then moved to Obama’s 2008 campaign and into the White House, where he earned a reputation as someone who could write speeches and parry with senior officials and Cabinet secretaries who wanted to put their fingerprints on the work.

If there were any doubts about him, Favreau quickly dispelled them when he wrote the first inaugural address and the president’s healthcare speech to Congress, said David Plouffe, a longtime Obama advisor.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s second inauguration

“Jon wasn’t going to come in with a draft that was not Barack Obama-like,” Plouffe said. “The president never has to worry that he’s going to get something and have to say, ‘This isn’t my voice.’”

Keenan is known for his handling of heartbreak and sadness. He was the lead writer on Obama’s speech at the Tucson memorial after the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).

Favreau plans to stay in Washington for a while, but he has often told friends that he wants to pursue screenwriting, as did former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, the co-creator of the new comedy “1600 Penn.”

His time in the White House should serve Favreau well, Plouffe said.

“He can write comedy, history, drama, suspense,” he said. “He’s got the whole range.”

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DEMOCRACY OR ELSE WITH POD SAVE AMERICA

TUE, JUN 25

Jon Favreau , Jon Lovett , Alyssa Mastromonaco , and Tommy Vietor

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The Artists

Jon Favreau, Founder

Jon Favreau served as Barack Obama’s head speechwriter from 2005-2013, a role that was far more senior and influential than Jon Lovett’s. In 2017, he co-founded Crooked Media, where he’s a co-host of Pod Save America , host of Offline with Jon Favreau , and host of The Wilderness . His first book, Democracy or Else , which he co-authored alongside his Crooked Media co-founders, will be released on June 25, 2024. Jon lives in Los Angeles with his wife Emily, their sons Charlie and Teddy, and their dog Leo.

Jon Lovett, Founder

Jon Lovett is a podcast host, former presidential speechwriter, and straight shooter widely respected on both sides. In 2017, he co-founded Crooked Media, where he co-hosts Pod Save America and hosts Lovett or Leave It , two beloved podcasts that are very good. His first book, Democracy or Else , which he co-authored alongside his Crooked Media co-founders, will be released on June 25, 2024. Before Crooked, he served as a speechwriter in the Obama White House and for Hillary Clinton, co-created a comedy on NBC called 1600 Penn (canceled after one perfect season), wrote for The Newsroom with Aaron Sorkin, and posted many perfect tweets before deleting the app forever.

Alyssa Mastromonaco

Alyssa Mastromonaco is the New York Times bestselling author of Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? and So Here's the Thing , and co-host of Hysteria , Crooked Media's all-woman-produced podcast. She also contributes to Crooked Media's Pod Save America , is a contributing editor to Marie Claire , and serves as Senior Advisor and spokesperson for NARAL Pro-Choice America. She previously was the youngest woman ever to serve as Deputy White House Chief of Staff of Operations and kept our country running through a government shutdown, natural disasters, national tragedies, and history-making events. Before serving as Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations, Alyssa held several positions in President Barack Obama's administration, campaign, political action committee, and Senate office.

Tommy Vietor, Founder

Tommy Vietor is a cofounder of Crooked Media, cohost of Pod Save America , and the host of the foreign-policy-focused Pod Save the World . His first book, Democracy or Else , which he co-authored alongside his Crooked Media co-founders, will be released on June 25, 2024. In a past life, he worked for President Obama for nine years, including a stint as White House National Security Spokesman. Originally from outside Boston, Vietor now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Hanna, their kids Lisette and James, and dog Lucca.

MORE INFORMATION

Former White House aides during the Obama administration, Jon Favreau , Jon Lovett , and Tommy Vietor are the hosts of the widely popular podcast Pod Save America . A no-bullshit conversation about politics, Pod Save America cuts through the noise to break down the week's news and helps listeners figure out what actually matters and how they can help. The hosts are regularly joined by journalists, activists, politicians, entertainers, and world leaders.

Crooked Media , founded by former Obama administration officials Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, publishes books under the Crooked Media Reads imprint. Crooked Media Reads is dedicated to publishing nonfiction and issue-driven fiction that informs, entertains, and inspires action, sparking the debates we need to have right now.

This program is made possible thanks to the generous support of Susan Bay Nimoy, Estate of Douglas M. Matheson, Seedlings Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, MacMillan Family Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, Charina Endowment Fund, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, PECO Foundation, Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina, Mustang Foundation, Michael Tuch Foundation, Jody and John Arnhold and the Arnhold Foundation, The Grodzins Fund, and The Isambard Kingdom Brunel Society of North America.

This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Symphony Space thanks our generous supporters, including our Board of Directors, Producers Circle, and members, who make our programs possible with their annual support.

Kathy Landau Executive Director Peg Wreen Managing Director Isaiah Sheffer * Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director (1978-1990) Artistic Director (1990-2010) Founding Artistic Director (2010-2012) Allan Miller Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director (1978-1990)

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