Obama’s chief speech writer was charged with finding something new to say about a subject the president had to speak about all too often.
In his new book Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America, the 42-year-old from Chicago writes about how he and Obama found that inspiration. Keenan brings readers on a fly-on-the-wall journey inside the White House during a whirlwind 10 days when he helped Obama pen one of the standout speeches of his presidency.
In Keenan’s memoir, he writes about how Obama admitted to his chief wordsmith that he really did not know what he wanted to say in the eulogy. He recalls Obama setting him next-to-impossible instructions: talk about guns, race, the Confederate flag – an enduring symbol of racism in the US – and “the pain it stirs up in so many citizens, and wrap it all up in grace”.
“Each of those events went at something primal and unanswered about this country and over those 10 days we answered them as a country probably as well as you could,” he says. The former speech writer knows the limits of speeches. He concedes that they will not restore much-needed grace to US politics, though he believes they can set a vision for how to go about it.
“It is time for some fresh blood who actually look more like the rest of the country and have lived more like the rest of the country,” he says.
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