The first time I heard about him was when Jack Corrigan walked into my office and said,
“I'm thinking about taking a chance with the keynote on this young guy out of Chicago.”
A new deal for the American People
Extremism in the defense of liberty
There is no substitute for victory
The United States of America
It was pretty unusual to have a two term state senator who was just a candidate for the U.S. Senate
be the keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention.
In 2004, there was an open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois.
We showed some early focus groups descriptions of Obama, who nobody had heard of at that point,
and they thought, “Well, this guy sounds pretty interesting.”
Then we showed them actual footage we had shot of Obama delivering this message,
and the result was overwhelming.
It gave us a sense that if we were able to get him on television,
if he was able to speak to people in the campaign,
Yes, we can.
there would be a very positive response.
The role of the keynote can be the rallying cry for the entire party.
Maybe, Mr. President, you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire
or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.
Women are obviously important, African-Americans are important.
I had not seen any videos of the guy, so I wasn’t really thinking about him very much
until we started to scour for ways to present the party and everything it stands for.
Generally when he has a big speech to write,
he holes himself away and you don’t hear from him for a couple of days.
All of us were waiting to see what the first draft would look like.
After a number of days, we did receive a fax that came in at 24 minutes.
The Kerry people had offered him 10.
I would make the cuts and send them off.
and within a day or two, the drafts would come back with most of the cuts restored.
And at the same time, his campaign was negotiating with the Kerry people to try to expand that time limit.
Tonight is a particular honor for me because let’s face it, my presence on this stage
is pretty unlikely.
It was my understanding he’d had very little experience with a teleprompter.
The two errors that people make are it looks like you're at a tennis match:
you read from here, then you read from here.
Or it's trying to look like you're not looking at the screen.
You're looking at the screen out of the corner of your eye
which, of course, looks extremely silly.
So it's that idea of having confidence, that people don't know I'm looking at the screens.
I'm looking at them.
Kinda late in the game, the Kerry people said we've got a line or two in Obama's speech
that we need to have taken out.
It was something about "we're not Red states and Blue states, we're the United States of America."
They said, you know, “That’s a message that Senator Kerry is going to be delivering,
so maybe you don’t need to deliver it.” But Barack was adamant.
It was not great that I had to ask him, but, you know, we found a good way to rewrite that section.
The pundits like to slice and dice our country into Red states and Blue states.
Red states for Republicans. Blue states for Democrats.
The hardest thing is splitting the difference between the home and the hall.
Am I performing the 16,000 people in front of me
or am I a little more concerned about the 40 to 60 million people that may be watching me on TV?
A technique I started implementing many years ago was something called "surfing the applause".
The audience at home can still hear you, even though the audience in the hall is applauding wildly.
They imagined...
You sort of talk over it.
They imagined me going to the best schools...
It's a little tricky to do and it takes an immense amount of control by the speaker.
...hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!
I went out to listen to the speech to make sure nothing went wrong, you know?
I had seen that speech on paper like a hundred times, but when he delivered it in that hall,
I just thought, “My God, we're going to have a black President in my lifetime.”
I don't think anybody thought it was going to happen four years later.
And this country will reclaim its promise and out of this long political darkness,
a brighter day will come. Thank you very much everybody. God bless you.
In the 2004 convention, we had more than 250 different speeches that occurred from the podium.
Having a speech-writing team,
making sure there's consistency and everybody's on message
is really an important task.
And it really was driven home to me when I saw Chris Christie's keynote speech
to the 2012 Republican Convention.
Ann Romney, the candidate's wife, gets up and gives a speech that is all about love.
Tonight, I want to talk to you about love
And immediately after her speech, Chris Christie got up and said:
Tonight, we’re gonna choose respect over love.
He talked mainly about himself
and he didn’t even mention Mitt Romney until he was least two thirds of the way through his speech.
Personally, I thought it was one of the most off-key keynote speeches I’ve ever heard.
There hasn't been a contested convention after the first ballot since 1952.
The Convention has become less suspenseful.
It's harder to make that interesting without very dynamic speakers.
This is our challenge.
The work goes on. The cause endures.
Some call it "compassionate conservatism". To me, it’s just caring about people.
As much as people think of conventions as maybe being a boring thing from the past,
they're still really important.
You want to make sure you're making the most of any convention.