VICKY RIDEOUT: I went out to listen to the speech to make sure nothing went wrong, you know. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: …hope in the face of uncertainty. MICHAEL SHEEHAN: It’s a little tricky to do, and it takes an immense amount of control by the speaker. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: …they imagined me going to the best schools… MICHAEL SHEEHAN: You sort of talk over it. Am I performing for 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. MICHAEL SHEEHAN: The hardest thing is splitting the difference between the home and the hall. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. But, we found a good way to rewrite that section. VICKY RIDEOUT: It was not great that I had to ask him. JOHN KUPPER: 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. VICKY RIDEOUT: 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.” So it’s that idea of having confidence, that, ‘people don’t know I’m looking at the screens I’m looking at them.’ You’re looking at the screen out of the corner of your eye which, of course, looks extremely silly. 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 screens. MICHAEL SHEEHAN (SPEECH COACH, 2004 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION): It was my understanding he’d had very little experience with a teleprompter. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Tonight is a particular honor for me because let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. And at the same time, his campaign was negotiating with the Kerry people to try to expand that time limit.ĪRCHIVAL (DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, 2004): 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. ![]() After a number of days, we did receive a fax that came in at 24 minutes. All of us were waiting to see what the first draft would look like. JOHN KUPPER: 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. 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. JACK CORRIGAN: Women are obviously important, African-Americans are important. President, you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or a missile we couldn’t afford to use! JACK CORRIGAN (MANAGER, 2004 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION): The role of the keynote can be a rallying cry for the entire party. ![]() 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, there would be a very positive response. 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 that we had shot of Obama delivering this message, and the result was overwhelming. SENATE CAMPAIGN): In 2004, there was an open U.S. Senate, be the keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention. VICKY RIDEOUT: It was pretty unusual to have a two term state senator, who was just a candidate for the U.S. VICKY RIDEOUT (DIRECTOR OF SPEECHWRITING, 2004 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION): 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.”
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