Changing of the Guard at White House Speechwriting Shop
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Official White House Photo by Pete Souza(WASHINGTON) — Tuesday night’s State of the Union address was not only one of the opening acts of President Obama’s second term, it also represented a changing of the guard in the White House speechwriting office.
Jon Favreau, the president’s muse since his days in the Senate, is on his way out, and a new chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan, in on his way in.
At his Feb. 6 press briefing, White House Press secretary Jay Carney noted that Keenan was “taking the lead” on this year’s State of the Union address, and that he would “be getting a higher profile in the weeks to come — internally, anyway.”
Favreau departs on March 1, and as reported in the Los Angeles Times, is considering a career in Hollywood screenwriting. Keenan has worked with Obama since his 2008 presidential campaign and helped write several of the president’s most notable speeches, including the remarks he delivered after the Tucson, Ariz., and Newtown, Conn., shootings.
A video released last week by the White House included a brief interview with Keenan, who once worked for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. In it, he said that the work of writing this week’s speech for a joint session of Congress, which was heavy on economic themes as well as such other policy priorities as immigration reform and gun control, began last November.
As The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta pointed out in a profile of the White House’s new chief speechwriter, Keenan, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said his job was “remarkably like graduate school.”
“You get a paper assignment, you might pull an all-nighter or come in really early to finish, and you hand it in and then you get his marks back and find out whether he likes it or not,” he told a Kennedy School Alumni publication in 2010. “The good thing is he’ll make detailed edits when he gets the speech, and he’s generous with his time — he’ll walk us through the edits and explain why he made them. That makes us better writers.”
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