Those final few moments leading up to President Barack Obama's State of the Union are sometimes fraught with mild panic for his team of speechwriters. There are words to include and phrases to scotch, especially if they don't suit President Obama's distinct rhetorical style. Jon Favreau, Obama's former chief speechwriter, knows this process all too well. In anticipation of tonight's SOTU, Favreau shares his strategy on what are the right notes to hit, how to steer the crowd into applause, and why those post-SOTU responses from a member of the opposing party are always "totally clumsy."

ESQ: So, you have a blank page in front of you. Where do you start?

JF: The blank page is always the biggest enemy. I am a person who starts from the beginning, so I cannot write other sections of the speech until I get the beginning right. That can take hours, if not days. The thing that you write on the blank page to kind of comfort yourself is, "Mr. Vice President, members of congress, and the American people," colon.

So you have that for a while. Then you want some kind of a big opening, you want applause early in the speech. You want some sort of applause at the outset, from both sides, both parties. Usually the beginning is some sort of unifying message about, you know, where the country is. You usually throw in the "the State of the Union" phrase somewhere towards the beginning. But the challenge is to get out of the beginning as fast as possible and into the meat of the speech, because there is a lot of it. You want to save room for everything.

ESQ: Would you have a list of phrases or topics that would usually get the applause?

JF: Not by topic. The topics are decided by the President, what his plans are, what his agenda is, what his vision is. But within the topics, while you're writing, you are aware that as you end the paragraph on any given issue, you want a note of applause.

So if you're calling on Congress to pass something, maybe you talk about the issue throughout the paragraph, and your last line is "so pass this bill right away!" You can generate applause that way. Basically the only time you think about applause is when you transition from one issue to the next.

ESQ: Since it is a touchy subject for the President and the legislative branch, how should he approach the government shutdown of last year?

JF: Because we fortunately ended the year on an unusually happy note, which was congress passing the budget, finally, that undid some of the damage from sequestration. Nobody got everything they wanted, certainly the White House didn't get everything it wanted. But I think that budget then becomes a model. You can talk about the shutdown in the sense that, "well, you guys finally passed the budget. You finally did a good thing. So now let's not repeat the mistakes of last year. Let's move forward."

ESQ: And will that get applause?

JF: [Laughs] Hopefully. I think it will, because he's going to be able to thank both parties for passing that budget. It's a bipartisan budget, right? No one's loving it, but a lot of them voted for it and it got through. And when you say let's move forward from shutting down our government or putting the credit rating at risk—it's hard to not applaud for that.

ESQ: In last year's State of the Union, the gun control issue wasn't really addressed at the tail end of the speech. Would you bring gun control closer up to the fore?

JF: It was at the end last time for emotional reasons. It was sort of the ending of the speech and we knew that [former Congresswoman] Gabby Giffords very courageously came to the State of the Union, and so the President demanded a vote, or asked Congress to give the victims a vote.

What happened is they did give them a vote, they voted in the Senate, and a majority voted for common sense gun proposals, but a minority in the Senate blocked it and filibustered it. There is no legislative way through the Senate for any common sense gun measures, even the most minor ones at this point.

It's not just the fault of the Republicans, it's also the fault of red state Democrats who are not courageous. I think it's very hard for the president to make a big deal of it tonight because we have the same exact make-up in the Senate and probably even less of a chance passing [a gun control bill] through the house. I think the president over the last coupe months has taken some executive actions around gun control and it's made a difference on the margins, but you kind of need a new congress to pass something significant.

ESQ: Given when you were writing these speeches, how frantic is it between now and when the actual State of the Union is delivered?

JF: It's frantic. Usually the substance of the speech is locked down the night before, the Sunday before. The big changes usually don't happen after that. What's happening is there's policy edits, there's research edits that keep coming right up to the last minute.

As the president actually delivers the speech for the first time during a practice session, then words change for tone, and for whatever the president wants. He kind of messes with the words up until a couple of hours before. And everyone is trying to cut the length. Anytime someone adds a few words to a sentence in the day of, you try to find words to cut somewhere else from the speech. It can be pretty frantic.

ESQ: How do you prepare yourself for the post-speech responses from the Michele Bachmanns and the Bobby Jindals? They don't really have a full sense of what the speech is going to entail, but did you in some way anticipate what they're going to react to? Or was that all an afterthought?

JF: The problem with giving a response that is kind of pre-canned or pre-pegged, is that you're not really responding to the speech. You are responding to what you think the speech is going to say, which is why these responses aren't that great. If you generate a response before the speech is given, or before you've seen the speech, it's based on your own political characterizations of what you imagine the president is going to say, and it's usually not that effective.

When we're writing the State of the Union, we don't think about the responses at all. And it turns out most Americans don't, either. That's true for both parties giving the responses throughout the years. It's a bad gig to have to follow up on the Speech of the Union.

ESQ: And they can be so clumsy. Bachmann staring into the wrong camera, or Marco Rubio lunging for a water glass.

JF: Totally clumsy.

ESQ: Is there any kind of satisfaction in seeing these kinds of reactions?

JF: I will tell you, even though I am a Democrat, since I am also a writer, and a speechwriter specifically, there is no satisfaction. Anytime someone looks like they're struggling while giving a speech, it pains me as a writer. I wish they would do away with them, or if people would just give their response in interviews. It's a better format. They're usually just so uniformly bad.

MORE ON THE STATE OF THE UNION:

• 'Game of Thrones' Can Explain Every Move Obama's Made

• Pierce: It's Time for Obama to Take Back His Presidency

• What Dumb Thing Will Distract Us This Year?

• I Just Checked Twitter and the State of Our Union Is Fine



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