A Way With Words

Today I had the unique opportunity to meet with two White House high-level speechwriters through one of the graduates of my program at UMD. It was so exciting to hear their take on what it is like to work for the both Bush administrations and the McCain-Palin campaign to name a few.


Scully and McConnell had very many intriguing and insightful things to say. They called their speech shop a little "word factory." I was suprised to hear that they collaborate in the writing process from the very begining and then the speech runs through many many hands before being finalized, sometime reaching up to draft number 30. They mentioned at the time they cleaned out their computers there were 10,800 speech drafts saved on the hard drive that are permanently resting in the presidential records.

Wow. That would be the job. Writing speeches for the president.