{"id":5885,"date":"2015-11-24T09:16:55","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5885"},"modified":"2015-11-24T09:16:55","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:16:55","slug":"the-speechwriter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/?p=5885","title":{"rendered":"THE SPEECHWRITER"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many will remember the name of Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina.\u00a0 Sanford\u2019s adulterous relationship overseas was big news a few years back.\u00a0 Sanford currently serves as US Congressmen for the first district of South Carolina.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is it like to be a political speechwriter?\u00a0 What is it like to be a speechwriter when a major crisis hits?\u00a0 Barton Swaim writes about all this and more in The Speechwriter: a Brief Education in Politics<\/i> (http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-Speechwriter-Brief-Education-Politics\/dp\/1476769923<\/a>).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Why in the world would a guy with a PhD in English from the University of Edinburgh become a speechwriter?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: What a lot of people working on their English PhDs don\u2019t realize \u2013 what I didn\u2019t realize \u2013 is that in any given year, there are about twice the number of new doctorates as available jobs. I spent almost three years looking for a sufficiently remunerative job in English, and I came up with nothing. I had to get creative, and that\u2019s when I inquired about writing for the governor. I read his stuff \u2013 op-ed and whatnot \u2013 and it was just awful. He needed a writer; I offered to be that writer; and off we went.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: You write about the difficulty of crafting speeches that conveyed Sanford\u2019s unique voice.\u00a0 How difficult was that to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: Writing to sound like someone else is always a tricky thing to do, but in his case it was all but impossible because \u2013 and this is where the fun comes in \u2013 his way of running an office was to hate everything anybody did. That very much included written products. So I would give him something I thought was near what he was looking for, he would say it was junk \u2013 and sometimes say so in very strident terms \u2013 and the whole thing would end badly. That\u2019s how almost every major piece went. It was a kind of destructive never-ending cycle. Not fun at all to live, but a lot of fun to write about.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: What in graduate school prepared you best for your job as a speechwriter?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: Probably nothing I learned in school, exactly. What prepared me best was that I had been writing for a long time. People sometimes ask how do you get published? I never know how to answer, but if I had to tell the truth, it would go something like this: Start reading and writing all the time; don\u2019t think about anything else all your waking hours; write and write some more, and read it aloud to see if it\u2019s any good. Do that for about ten years straight, and by the end of it you should be a pretty decent writer. That\u2019s what I did. That\u2019s not the full story, of course, but in some ways, formal schooling was just an addition.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: You speak openly about how the job pressures affected your young family.\u00a0 Is it possible to be involved meaningful in modern politics and still maintain a strong family life?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: It is. It all depends on who you work for. People used to talk about \u201cSanford widows\u201d \u2013 the wives of guys who worked for him. He was just one of those people whose total myopic view of the world, whose bottomless self-regard, demanded all your time and all your attention \u2013 and then you still couldn\u2019t please him. Sadly, a lot of people have emailed or called me since the book came out to say they work for a boss just like that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the other hand, I used to hear about other politicians who were a joy to work for. Tellingly, I guess, there were never any jobs available in those offices.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: One of my takeaways from your book, and I hope I am wrong, is this: There are incompetent, but likeable people in politics.\u00a0 And there are competent, but not particularly likeable people.\u00a0 It is rare to find competent and<\/i> likeable people.\u00a0 Am I cynical or is there some truth to this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: I think that\u2019s close to the truth, only instead of likeable I\u2019d say \u201cgood.\u201d In politics \u2013 and in many other areas, but it seems especially pronounced in politics \u2013 the most effective leaders are not what you would readily describe as good people. They\u2019re just not. The good ones \u2013 the truly honest, the ones whose humility is genuine and not of the ersatz variety \u2013 just don\u2019t win. It\u2019s something I think many of us need to get used to. We want to like certain politicians because we think they\u2019re essentially honest and true. Well, it\u2019s in their interest as politicians<\/i> to persuade you that they\u2019re honest and true; but they might not be. You may well be fooled. The lesson, for me, was to stop looking for good people in politics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Speaking of cynicism, how did you keep from becoming a cynic?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: Maybe I didn\u2019t keep from becoming a cynic. I don\u2019t know. I think what I learned, though, was to take politics less seriously. Politics is always going to be dominated by self-aggrandizing and essentially dishonest personalities. Once you come to terms with that fact, you can begin to enjoy politics more. When you believe that politicians used to be good and now they\u2019re bad \u2013 and when you believe that what we need is to get good people back in office \u2013 it\u2019s enormously taxing on your emotions. Because it\u2019s false. Sure, some things have declined \u2013 I do believe that. But people in power have always been prone to abuse their power, politicians have always survived on their vanity, and people in authority have always done stupid things with that authority. Yes, the government is vastly larger than it used to be, and the debts are greater and the stakes are higher; but that just means we\u2019re closer to a decline and fall that\u2019s always been inevitable. Is that cynical? Maybe, but in my view it\u2019s truer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moore: Would you ever consider being a speechwriter again?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Swaim: No. But even if I would consider it, who would hire me?<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many will remember the name of Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina.\u00a0 Sanford\u2019s adulterous relationship overseas was big news a few years back.\u00a0 Sanford currently serves as US Congressmen for the first district of South Carolina. What is it like to be a political speechwriter?\u00a0 What is it like to be a speechwriter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,71,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-interview","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5886,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885\/revisions\/5886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.twocities.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}