Politicians and Script Writers
posted by Daniel Solove
Much has been made of the fact that large parts of Sarah Palin’s speech were already pre-written before she was even chosen as the VP candidate. According to the Washington Post:
Not anticipating that McCain would choose a woman as his running mate, the speech that was prepared in advance was “very masculine,” according to campaign manager Rick Davis, and “we had to start from scratch.”
It is common in today’s political landscape for speech writers to pen most of the words in a politician’s speeches — both for Republicans and Democrats. What always irks me is all the commentary about the speeches. The commentators — on all sides of the political spectrum — are saying how much Palin’s speech reveals about her. But are we really learning much about Palin from the speech if she didn’t write a large chunk of it?
If the words are written by others, what exactly does a speech tell us? Why do we pretend as though the words are really coming from the particular politician? If the skill is the ability to read convincingly from the teleprompter, or to deliver the lines with gusto and confidence, then isn’t this more suited for an actor or actress?
One thing that always irks me is when quotes from movies are attributed to particular actors, as if Robert DeNiro or Julia Roberts originated a particular line in the same way that Shakespeare or Einstein created their own words. We all know that actors and actresses are just vessels for delivering the words of others. We wouldn’t attribute quotes to the person who read a particular line for an audio book on CD. Why do we do so when an actor or actress delivers a line in a movie? Or when a singer sings a song written by another?
Suppose we found out that Lincoln had a speech writer write the Gettysburg Address. Would our opinion of him change if we learned that his eloquent words were not really his own, and that he merely delivered the lines in a particularly compelling way?
September 4, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Posted in: Law and Humanities, Politics
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Responses (8)
the Rising Jurist - September 4, 2008 at 2:03 pm
What irks me is that this issue hasn’t come up in 19 months of soaring Obama rhetoric. But as soon as Palin delivers a fireball of a speech, everyone’s up in arms about ghostwriting.
Logical Extremes - September 4, 2008 at 2:37 pm
An actor’s reputation is dependent on how well he can convey a persona often very different from his real self. A politician’s reputation is, in part, dependent on how sincerely he can deliver his messages. If a politician does not believe or at least support what he says, he has no business making those statements. But we can only hope that intelligent people can look beyond the oration skills and think critically about the issues.
William McGeveran - September 4, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Dan:
I take your main point, but I think you are still underestimating the political speaker’s role in any speech, even those that are written largely by staff. In my experience it is an iterative process, with the politician setting a tone to which the writer must adapt, meeting with the writer, and then editing drafts. There are reasons why Reagan, Clinton, and Bush each have their own clearly identifiable tone and style, even though each had multiple speechwriters.
More generally, what actors and politicians do is not chopped liver. You may think the most important communication that happens in theater or speech is in the words, but at least in the television age I doubt that. Skillful and sensitive delivery is a crucial component of the meaning that listeners will receive, as anyone who has seen a high school performance of Shakespeare can attest. You perceive much, much more than the words on the page, and you draw conclusions from those perceptions.
And, since this is a (mostly) legal blog: how does this compare to clerks’ work on judicial opinions?
- Bill
Daniel J. Solove - September 4, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Bill,
Fair point about the importance of delivery. But we still, at least in some contexts, care about who creates the substance. What if a student submitted an essay and said openly: “I didn’t write this, but a ghostwriter did”? Perhaps we should say: “Great job! You’re fit to be President or Vice President of the United States — or even a Supreme Court Justice. Please read it to me, and if you do so convincingly, then the words are yours!”
When it comes to painting, we want the brush strokes to be by the painter, not by a staff of employees. We do accept ghostwritten nonfiction books, especially autobiographies. But what if we learned that Stephen King really doesn’t write his books but in fact has a staff of 10 book writers? Many would be outraged.
In other words, my point is that in some cases, we readily accept the fact that the performers are not the writers. In other cases, we get outraged if there is such a disjunction.
As for law clerks, it is a bit troubling that many judicial opinions aren’t written by the judges. People love to quote Justice Holmes or Judge Learned Hand. Imagine if their words were written by others. Should we still quote them the same way?
The phenomenon of others writing one’s words seems to be largely in the past 50 or so years. I wonder when this really started in earnest. I’m sure it went on long before, but nowhere near the level of prevalence it occurs today. We can be fairly confident that the quips of Oscar Wilde are really his. We know that the words we quote from Justice Holmes were really penned by Justice Holmes. But today, who really knows? Does it matter? I realize we can’t really go back, but I do think something is lost when the politicians and judges are no longer writing their own material.
JP - September 4, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Specialization of labor is inevitable. This doesn’t particularly offend me with regard to political speeches.
However, I can’t stand political “debates” where the participants ignore the questions and spout pre-prepared mini-speeches instead.
A.J. Sutter - September 4, 2008 at 9:12 pm
I think Sarah Palin’s delivery was terrific, and that she made the words seem her own.
The problem with knowing that it was ghost-written is that so far this speech is close to the ONLY evidence we have about her at a national level. Not much is yet know outside Alaska about her ability to think on her feet or about her deliberative abilities. On that evidentiary basis, I’d sooner have Josiah Bartlett, David Palmer, or Laura Roslin as President (though it’s not clear that Roslin would meet the Constitutional requirements about birthplace). Implicit in this comparison is that I do think we need to consider Palin as running for President, given McCain’s age and health history.
This is different from Obama’s case, and from the case with other candidates and Presidents, whom we’ve been able to see in more spontaneous performance. Though when Spiro Agnew spoke, who can forget it was William Safire who wrote the words?
As for the Lincoln case, I think my opinion would indeed change. I have no way of gauging his performance, other than through the voice of Gregory Peck or other actors who have portrayed Lincoln. It wouldn’t necessarily affect my opinion of Lincoln as President, since we have a lot of other evidence of how he performed in that role. But since my main ways of judging him qua orator are, aside from Hollywood, the words attributed to him and the hagiography that has grown up around him, learning that someone else wrote the words would make a difference.
P.S. Ruckman, Jr. - September 5, 2008 at 1:16 am
If the opinions of a Supreme Court justice are usually written by law clerks, what does that really tell us about him/her? How well do we really know them?
WIlliam McGeveran - September 5, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Dan:
All good points — I think we mostly agree. Our expectations of the degree of authorship do vary a lot with context and have changed over time. We accept that actors and TV anchors are almost entirely scripted by others, although in fact many of these folks do contribute a lot of changes to the material. We want fiction authors and painters to do that work themselves, but with exceptions there too: the artistic workshops of earlier times gave rise to different expectations, certain large installation pieces in modern museums are supervised by credited artists but executed by teams, and of course many editors have famously shaped great writers.
To restate my earlier empirical point: most politicians (and judges) do a lot more writing than the popular imagination suggests. It may take more the form of heavy editing than doing the first draft, but the good ones have a significant role in the content of a major speech and don’t just have it handed to them or scrolled through a teleprompter.
Would it be better if their role were larger? I think that’s hard to say. I like JP’s framing of it as “specialization of labor.” When reading political biographies about the past, it comes across forcefully that presidents used to have a lot more time to reflect and write. Indeed, a president who writes too much of his or her own material today might be guilty of inappropriate time management.
Anyway, I think the praise for Palin’s speech was not, mostly, about its drafting but about the underlying story it told and her delivery. I agree that those were both very successful, and both belong authentically to her.
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