On Speechwriting

For more than two years of my life, I was a speechwriter.

Speechwriting is one of those strange professions where your job is almost akin to being a translator: to bring forth someone’s thoughts and beliefs and intended promises, and wrap them all up in a speech that will helpful move, motivate, inspire. In politics, where the art of public persuasion takes its highest form (yes I am a romantic), speechwriters are the architects and the constructors of political promise and power.

Speechwriting is also strange because so much of the esteem that you may hope to hold in the eyes of others is really just reflected glory of whoever it was that was reading those words that you had worked on. No one wants to talk about the speechwriter to some aspiring up-and-coming town councilor in some rural state out in some third world country, but the speechwriter to the President of the United States of America will likely find his way into the pages of the New York Times, and into any dinner party in Washington D.C. that would have him.

I genuinely enjoyed the process and the craft of speechwriting. Of course it requires a love and appreciation for politics, but often it also requires someone with the patience and intellectual bandwidth for the minutiae of public policy. Every politicians needs to sell something, and the politician’s speech is the coin of the realm.

Add another interesting ingredient: poetry. The best speeches of our times – “ask now what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”, or “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – are not merely words to tell or to promise, but a intricate dance between speaker and audience, a soaring orchestra of rhyme and rhetoric that carries a politicians’ words far above the realm of the sordid, and lifts its audience upwards, to animate and motivate and inspire.

Unfortunately, in Malaysia, speechwriting is still mostly an amateur’s art. There are a number of speechwriters who gain a sort of anonymous immortality through the political acts and speeches of their principals, and any politician worth their salt will often have their own preferred wordsmiths, especially for the “big” speeches: the policy speech at the upcoming party convention, or a nationwide telecast speech in response to an unexpected global pandemic. But for the most part, the recruitment of speechwriters in Malaysia is still very haphazard, and entry into the profession – if it can even be called that, here – is still very much on a who-knows-who, often serendipitous basis.

In such political environments, speechwriting is often for the young political aspirant – willing to accept poor pay and long hours in return for the chance to live out their “Bartlet for America” dreams, and to purchase entry into the knife-fight that is Malaysian politics.

What does it take to be a good speechwriter? I’ve touched on some of these earlier, but it is useful to provide a summary: An abiding interest and passion for politics and history. The patience and grit to dig into the details of public policy. Ability to understand the audience one would be speaking to. Empathy and understanding of the principal’s personality, interests, and political priorities. Intellectual bandwidth and breadth of knowledge, buttressed by lots and lots of reading. A passion for language, poetry and rhetoric – and in Malaysia, the ability to operate fluently in at least Bahasa Melayu and English. Capacity for hard work.

I would like to think I was a decent speechwriter. Sadly I was not one of the lucky few who could carve out a living – let alone riches or fame! – through speechwriting in Malaysia. But I will never lose that fascination for the art and the craft of political speechmaking. (Ok time for another West Wing binge soon, I think!)