The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What Makes a Political Speech Hit or Miss the Mark?

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Political speechwriters have an important role to play in any election campaign. And of course, there's an art to their craft. So, what ingredients go into effective speechwriting? What makes some speeches memorable, and others miss the mark entirely? Host Steve Paikin asks: Jeni Armstrong, former lead speechwriter for Justin Trudeau, and Assistant Professor of Political Management at Carleton University; Michael Taube, former speech writer for Stephen Harper, and a columnist for the National Post, Troy Media, and Loonie Politics; and Jared A. Walker, former speechwriter for Jagmeet Singh, and Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors at Broadbent Institute. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Political speech writers have an important role to play in any election campaign, and of course there's an art to what they do. So what ingredients go into effective speech writing? What makes some speeches memorable and others miss the mark entirely? Let's find out from, in the nation's capital, Jenny Armstrong, former lead speech writer for Justin Trudeau, now assistant professor of political management at Carleton University. And with us here in studio, Michael Tobe, former speechwriter for Stephen Harper and

economist now for the National Post, Troy Media, and Looney Politics. And Jared Walker, former speechwriter for Jagmeet Singh and Vice Chair of the Board of Directors at the Broadbent Institute. Good to have you two gentlemen here in our studio. Jenny, thanks for being there on the line from the nation's capital and let's get into it right away. In your view, Jenny, what are the most important ingredients that go into a great and memorable speech?

Well, actually, I think it was Ted Sorensen, who was JFK's speechwriter, who summarized it perfectly. He said there are four key ingredients to a good political speech, clarity, charity, brevity, and levity. And listen, there are some times when you can't apply all four. Levity might not be appropriate at a eulogy, for example, but I think they're all great. And in particular, levity, because in a political context, let's say you're given 20 minutes to deliver your speech, nobody's upset if you cut it off at

17 minutes. Conversely, though, if you go 45 minutes long, people are starting to wiggle in their seats and they've got an eye on the exit. So I think brevity is an important one. An overarching thing to keep in mind though is that it's really important that the message that you're delivering is meaningful for the audience. So that means that the tone and the language that you use is suitable for the people that you're speaking to. Now Clarity, Charity, Brevity and Levity are great advice when you're Ted Sorensen and

you're writing for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Michael, don't take this the wrong way. I'm not. But Stephen Harper was no JFK when it came to giving a speech. He could do okay, but he wasn't JFK. He wouldn't say that he was either. Okay. So do you have to change your approach

if you're writing for a guy who doesn't necessarily lift it off the page in a way that JFK did? Well, sure, certainly. And when I started in 2006, obviously Stephen Harper was speaking at a different level at that time. He was becoming more comfortable in front of the microphone with various topics, et cetera.

So yes, I mean, you have to mold a speech, much like Jenny alluded to, you have to mold it to and craft it to the person, per se. It's not you, the speechwriter, who is writing. You know, you're writing for Stephen Harper, or I was writing for Stephen Harper in this case. I'm not writing for myself. I'm not writing a column like I normally do.

So I have to take his personality, his styles, you know, his eccentricities, his interests, his likes, his dislikes, and I have to put into this big pot of stew and somehow come out with something that makes sense. But the advantage also was, I had known Stephen Harper since 1996, so I was familiar with him, how he worked, what he was interested in,

and what sort of messaging that he wanted in the system. That's what Jenny alluded to. Messaging is key. You have to know your audience. You have to know the people that you're speaking to. And you also have to know the person who is speaking to them. And if you master all of that, you have a good speech. How did you do it for Jigmeet Singh?

Yeah, I mean, I think all of that's true. I think also really, really key is make me feel something. Let me know you see me. And I think that's one of Jigmeet's superpowers, right? You get into a room and make every person in that room feel like they are the only person in that room. And when you have somebody like that, then you might want to lean pretty heavily into an anecdote

or into a personal story that might resonate with other folks in the room, or you might want to lean quite heavily into a story from the campaign trail and how that then ties into what it is that you need to talk about. So, Janney, let's talk about the arc of a speech. I guess the conventional wisdom is you've got to grab them by the you-know-what in the first minute just to get their attention. Or do you want to kind of just go easy as they go and then work up to some kind of crescendo? What's the plan when you set out to do it? Well, it depends on a lot of things as others have alluded to. It depends on the speaker.

It depends on the moment. It depends on the audience. I love what Jared said in terms of trying to find a way to work in personal anecdotes, show that you understand where people are and meet them where they are. At a certain point though, there are going to be some key messages that you need to insert into a speech. Sometimes that's really, really tricky to do. I remember a, I think it was a commencement speech at the University of Ottawa and I had started on a draft and then I had some senior staff come to me and say, okay, but we need to mention our middle-class tax cut. And I'm like, friends, these are 21-year-olds who are just graduating from university, excited

to set out on their new lives into the world. I'm not sure I can make that work. And that raises an interesting point. It's not so much the blocks of content in a speech that are tricky to write, it's the transitions. It's how you move from one idea to the next that I think you really see a speechwriter sort of at their best or really sort of digging into their craft. Michael, can I get you on that issue of whether or not you've got to hit them with full guns of blazing right off the top, or do you want to lead up to something? You know, there's a crescendo that you typically follow. And again, it also depends on the person who's doing the speech.

In this case, if I use Stephen Harper, there were certain styles that he'd liked that, say, Jagmeet Singh for Jared would not necessarily, or Justin Trudeau for Jenny would not necessarily follow that model. So you basically have to use the person, or think of the person in mind and build the speech around them.

So sometimes yes, sometimes no. And it also depends on your audience. Who are you speaking in front of? You know, what's the issue about? As Jenny correctly said, sometimes you're suddenly thrown something in that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic. And what in God's name are you going to do?

It's like, I can't put taxes in. Hello, the Filipino community. How are you guys doing? And that's, but that's the key to what all of us have done. We have to find the best way to do this and then work with our teams to ensure that the messaging is nice and solid and strong. Well, okay, do you tell him, here's what I think you should do,

or does he tell you, write it this way for me because this is what I want? I think it depends on the person. And once you get a rapport with somebody, you've worked with them for long enough, it's a dialogue. And also it's a dialogue with the audience, right? So with Jagmeet, he very often had a song in his heart

about a specific thing. He had a specific anecdote that maybe he wanted to give. Sometimes I had the opportunity to be on the trail with him quite a bit, particularly when we were running for the leadership. So I had a little book of all the things that might come up that he might want to pull into something. But if you're lucky, it's both. I know you've all seen, never mind written, but you've also seen your share of speeches over the years.

And I want to tap into that experience to find out what doesn't work. Okay, Jenny, what have you seen and come away thinking, boy, that was ineffective and here's why. I think if your speech becomes a meme, it probably wasn't a great speech. And the one that I'm thinking of in particular is from Jeb Bush where he made a joke and then kind of paused, leaned in, looked at the audience and said, please clap. Like, listen, if you're having to ask people to clap at your jokes, maybe the joke didn't land. But more than that, I think it's really important that you're using language that your audience understands and can relate to. I remember once getting a policy brief from colleagues in PMO and they were talking about

labor market attachment and how this new measure would enhance labor market attachment. And I eventually just raised my hand and said, I don't know what that is. You're going to have to explain that to me. And so much of your job as a speechwriter is doing what I call English to English translation. As it turns out, labor market attachment is the willingness of parents to go back into the workforce after they've been away on a parental leave. And so I just said to my colleagues, why don't we just say that in the speech and get rid of the sort of bloated bureaucratic jargon that is the default for a lot of folks in Ottawa. Michael, what doesn't work? Well, I mean with leaders or even I've written speeches also as well for

cabinet ministers, sometimes when they're out of their element I find is the worst thing of all. They think that they know what they're doing and then they're comfortable with the language, they like the final speech version, they go in and they look like they're completely out of place. When that happens, I'm not going to attack anyone directly. That's when it really looks bad. And I've seen that with world leaders, and I've seen it all the way to backbenchers.

When you're out of your element, that's the worst possible place for you. But at the same time, this is the role that you're being paid for. This is the job that you have. You have to figure out how to deal with a situation you may not necessarily be very comfortable with and use the words that I crafted

or others have crafted, and try to make the best out of it. But sometimes, to be fair, it just doesn't work. You ever written a speech, Jared, and you thought afterwards, that just did not hit the mark? Ooh, yeah. Unfortunately, I think we've all been there. Yes. What was the situation in your case?

I don't want to get too particular about it, but I will say comedy is hard. Oh, yeah. Yes. What is the situation in your case? I don't want to get too particular about it, but I will say comedy is hard. Oh, yeah. And then on top of that, what you think is funny versus what your, what the person giving the speech thinks is funny is an extra barrier. And then if you're doing joke construction

and they take the speech back and move things around, then you get into a whole situation that is, it's not ideal. So I'm loose-guying here, but I can imagine you went to whoever it was, maybe you want to tell me, maybe you don't, and said, this is a great line, this is going to kill. And they used it and it didn't. It was a great line, I think it was gonna kill. And then the punchline and the setup were replaced. And the joke. By the speaker?

By the speaker, and the joke fell flat. So sometimes when people are nervous, they wanna go back to their comfort zone. And then there's the issue of sometimes you gotta, you have to ask someone, please trust me on this. And if they wanna go with you on the journey, then maybe you get the result that you're looking for, but sometimes they don't. You've got to tell us who it was.

I really, really can't. They're still working and I couldn't possibly, plus I love them a lot. We know where the bodies are buried. We don't reveal it. Jenny, can you give us an example of where you wrote something for Justin Trudeau and it just didn't land. Oh my gosh. I was really hoping that this would just be buried in the annals of Hansard never to come

back and haunt me again. But amongst friends, I will share. One of my favorite speeches that I ever wrote, and I think we're going to show a clip from it in a minute, is from an introduction that Prime Minister Trudeau did of President Barack Obama in the House of Commons. And I regret to say that that introduction included not only the word bromance, but also the word due diplomacy. And I really wish it didn't, because that was not the word. Yeah.

Due diplomacy. Yeah. Okay. Sheldon, I know, okay, this is a little out of order, but since Jenny has brought this up, can we go to, this is the second clip on page two. Okay, so this is Justin Trudeau introducing the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, 2016 House of Commons. Bring on the bromance. Roll it if you want.

It's not in the clip, thank goodness. When I consider President Obama's time in office, history books will record the signature policies. What I will remember, what I hope we all will remember, are the lessons you order but by example. That we are accountable. Okay, despite your lack of comfort Jenny at using the words bromance and due diplomacy, there actually was some of that going on between those two guys as you can see. But okay, setting those two things aside, what did you actually like about that speech? Well, I think what I liked about it when I wrote it was some of the rhetorical parallel structure, right? So executive order example. Like there was a little bit of wordplay in

there that I liked. But I think when I go back and look at that speech now, frankly, I find it really poignant. The rest of the quote goes on to say, the prime minister goes on to say things like, you know, we're stronger together than we are apart. We're more alike than we are different. Those words in particular in the context of contemporary Canadian-American politics, I think are quite something. And frankly, I think there was a time when

the American president was quite reserved in the use of executive orders. It wasn't an everyday occurrence, but I noted last Friday, President Trump issued one, as he does just about every day, called the Make America's Showers Great Right? So it just goes to show how much things have changed. That speech is only nine years old, but it really does feel like it was a lifetime ago. That actually was. That was a moment in the Oval Office where the president had decided that Joe Biden's regulations to reduce the water pressure on showers was unacceptable in Mr. Trump's America and therefore they've made showers great again by allowing high-pressure showers to be out there. That's right. Okay, whatever. We weren't part of it. Okay,

Michael, to you. In 2006, Stephen Harper is giving a speech about Brian Mulrooney. The former Prime Minister, Mr. Mulrooney, has been chosen at that time as the greenest Prime Minister at an awards dinner. And OK, this is an interesting assignment for you, because we know that the two of them don't necessarily love each other. In fact, we could go further than that to say there was a certain antipathy between the two

of them. At times, yes. And yet, you've got to have words coming out of Stephen Harper's mouth that are lauding Brian Mulroney. Right. What happened? Well, the advantage here is these are the two prime ministers I know best and always knew best.

And because I knew them and I understood them, I knew how far certain things could go and how much I would have to pull back on other things. Actually, it's funny Jared mentioned it. I tried humor, actually, in the early drafts of this. Because a lot of people don't know that I held the pen for some of the early drafts on this. We tried some humor.

It wasn't, to be fair, Harper's forte. Stephen has never particularly liked humor unless he's the one who's actually interjecting it, and that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that. So we eventually made it more serious as time went along. But what I always liked about the speech in particular, which I've always regarded as a team effort,

it's not just me, there's many others. I mean, which I've always regarded as a team effort. It's not just me. There's many others. I mean, when I write my column, that's me. Everything else is a team effort. I like the fact that I was able to put two men that I knew that I liked, that I've spoken with, that I was on a first name basis with. You know, Mr. Mulroney has obviously passed away

and he's missed. But I was able to put all these things together I knew about these men for decades and build something that I was quite proud of. Here we are. From almost a decade ago, Stephen Harper on Brian Mulrooney. Roll it if you would, Sheldon. Not a soul in this room would have predicted

that all these years later, Mr. Mulrooney would be honored by the environmental movement, had a head table with Sheila Copps, and introduced by a former lieutenant of the Reform Party. Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh! Now, OK. The humor worked very well there, don't you think? In part, that's mine. That's actually one of the things that did stuck around. Yes, I thought it did actually work quite well. And again, it's interesting, as time goes along, not to go too much inside baseball,

Harper has enjoyed using humor much more now than he did before. And I always think of Bob Dole, who was held back in 1996 from really being the true person that he was. He would still have lost to Bill Clinton in that presidential election. But if that had actually shown up, who knows, the results might have been tighter.

And he eventually wrote a book about wit and humor, sort of the history of it many years later. It's funny, Stephen Harper actually has a very good sense of humor. He does use it from time to time. But there was always a discomfort, at least back then. I think now, almost 20 years later, it's helped. And I'd like to think or hope that maybe speeches like that

gave him a little bit of more confidence that, you know, I'm going to put my own character into it even more. Apropos of that, I remember at Jim Flaherty's funeral, Stephen Harper had a great line, which was, everybody loves Jim Flaherty. Me, I can't even get my friends to like me. That's right. Now, who wrote that one? I don't know.

But you know what? They were all, but he was being honest. And he liked it because he would only allow things in that he was comfortable with. And he was happy to say that. And shows, you know, sometimes honesty is the best policy as they say and I think it was there. 2018 NDP convention, Jagmeet Singh is up there with a victory speech and or the keynote speech rather and okay, do you want to give us a little of the background before we see a clip

of that speech? Yeah, so this is Jagmeet's first convention, first speech to the faithful as the leader, not as the newly minted leader, but as the leader. And I chose this particular segment of the speech because it tees up something that we actually got done in this last government. So for me personally, it's a bit of a full circle moment where Jagmeet talks about some of the things that are priorities for him

he tells an anecdote that he was dying to put in in a very specific way and All these years later. I dug it up from the archives that I saw wow We we managed to pull that off with 25 MPs. Look at us go. Let's find out what you're talking about. Sheldon, if you would, let's roll it. I ask you to ask any health professional you know, and I'm sure they'll tell you that people live longer, healthier, better lives when they have good teeth. So why aren't we looking beyond expanding to pharmacare

and look to including dental care as a part of our universal healthcare system? And then further on to eye care. Together with true universal healthcare, we are the NDP on a path which, and I give you the, to the extent that you want credit, the NDP managed to get the previous government to bring that in and we have dental care now, or the beginnings of a dental care program in this country. It's interesting how he was on stage, no lectern, big empty stage, and just him. Yes. Obviously a clear choice, why? I think with many people, at its best,

when you strip it away, a speech is a conversation, right? And Jagmeet is at his best in interpersonal moments, like really quite micro-moments. You put him in a room with five people, he gets to take as long as he likes with every individual person, and get to hear their story, and then get to reflect back to them

that they're important. So a physical barrier like a lectern kind of removes even the feeling for him and the audience that they're connected to one another, and he just doesn't like them. So we got rid of the lecter, and we gave him a handheld. And he kind of roamed. And it works for him.

Was he reading off a teleprompter? He was in part reading off a teleprompter. And then every once in a while, we just give him space to riff on appropriate subject, because he was going to do it anyway. Got it. OK Got it, okay. Michael, you used an expression a few moments ago, and you hear this all the time,

but I'm not sure everybody knows what it means. I held the pen on that speech. What does that mean? That basically means that I'm the person who where everything is going through. I'm the filter. So in other words, I'm the person writing it. If you have issues, you go through me.

If you have rewrites, you go through me. If you wanna be yelled at, it's gonna be me who's gonna be a person writing it. If you have issues, you go through me. If you have rewrites, you go through me. If you want to yell that, it's going to be me. It was going to be a part of it. Holding the pen means you are the one in control of the situation. I think the two of you might agree with that. I think that's fair. And it means that basically everything centers around you.

It doesn't mean you're the most important person in the room, but you're the one controlling the words. And you will, you are the one who hands the speech to the leader. Yes, exactly, and goes through many rewrites, sadly. In which case, that raises another issue, and Jenny, I'll get to you on this one. You know, we have this, I guess it's probably because of Teddy Sorensen writing for JFK. We assume that this one person locks himself up in a room and just, you know, cranks the thing out. But how much of speech writing today is by one inspired individual as opposed to by a

committee? I'm going to go down a limb and say it is almost never, if not never, one individual. You're absolutely right, Steve. We do have this kind of romantic notion. And listen, I understand it. I had a beautiful office in Centre Block. I could spin in my chair and see the Peace Tower. But the reality was most of the time that was behind me out the window. I was heads down working. And when I teach speech writing to my students at Carleton, one of the points I really tried to drive

home is that while you are the person who literally holds the pen, like Michael has said, more than anything else, speech writing is project management because you're reaching out to people, you're getting all of the information from the operations team, from the policy folks. Then you're sitting down, crunching through that first draft, but then you're into edits, revisions, translations, translation checks, formatting it for the podium or the teleprompter. So if there was a checklist of 20 items, honestly, writing that first draft is just one of 20 things you have to get done.

And Jared, let me ask you as well about ideological alignment. I guess the assumption is that everybody who's writing a speech for a leader or a cabinet minister or whatever is going to be of the same party and hold the same values as the person you're writing for. But I presume there are just sort of professional speech writers who are out there who don't particularly agree with the ideology, but they just know how to write speeches. How much of interaction with them would you have had on writing a speech? I mean, I think that there's probably folks who are ringers who will have pen will hire. But I think on that front, even when you are inside a party,

even our party, which is largely left to center left, there's a lot of variation inside that party in terms of ideology and in terms of temperament and in terms of style. So I've written for all sorts of folks, and I've definitely written for people with whom I do not agree on every issue. But at the end of the day, you've got a job to do.

You're on a team, and you're trying to speak to people and come across as authentic and share what's important with folks. Michael, the boss is obviously the boss. Of course. And the boss gets the final word. Yes. But what, I'm sure there were moments where you thought you must say this,

this line is gonna be fantastic, and he doesn't see it and he wants to take it out. How do you resolve those issues? Oh, he knew damn well when I came in that was gonna happen because he and I have talked in private and we would both. This is Hugh and Harper. Yeah, Stephen Harper, he and I well when I came in that was going to happen, because he and I have talked in private. This is Stephen Harper. Yeah, Stephen Harper. He and I would admit this in public.

We had certain disagreements and arguments on things, nothing violent or anything like that. But of course, but again, that's part of ideology. You're supposed to have your own opinions. He had his own opinions, I had mine, and naturally you're going to occasionally butt heads, but not in a bad way. Look, ideology is obviously very crucial to working in a prime minister's office, but it's not a necessity completely.

There are hired guns, as Jared basically said, and it's true. There are some people who may agree with certain policy ideas, but may not be true believers, which makes it very, very different how it actually evolves and comes out. But I can say that certainly in the Harper PMO, the preference was to have people that at least thought the same way, but not everybody there did, believe it or not, including a couple of people I worked with directly. How did it work in Justin Trudeau's PMO, Jenny, in terms of you've got to be a card-carrying, true-believing, Trudeau-loving liberal?

Well, listen, I think it absolutely. The short answer is yes, it helps if there is an ideological alignment between the person who's writing this speech and the person who's delivering it. But more importantly, at the end of the day, we're ghostwriters. We are the people standing at the back of the rooms with their arms crossed looking at the floor. We're not the person on center stage. And so it's most important that the words on the page and the speech that gets delivered

really accurately represents the speaker's orientation, their beliefs, and their ideology. I think that's much more important than what an individual speechwriter thinks. Let me do a follow-up with you, Jenny, because Michael has said obviously that he knew Stephen Harper very well. Jared, same with you, Jenny, because Michael has said, obviously, that he knew Stephen Harper very well. Jared, same with you and Jagmeet Singh. How well did you actually know Justin Trudeau in order to write speeches for him? Not very. I will confess right off the top.

I think the first speech that I wrote for Trudeau was when he was leader of the Liberal Party. That would have been, it was a throne speech response, I think in the spring of 2013. And I didn't actually meet him in person until the fall of the following year when we both happened to be at an event. So I wrote, I don't know, probably six, eight, 10 speeches for him in that intervening 15 months. And we did talk on the phone parts, you know, we would be on the same conference calls and things like that. But no, I wrote for him for more than a year

before we met in person. And I think it might surprise some folks to know that's really not that uncommon. I think Michael's experience of having known Stephen Harper for a long time before he started working on his speeches is actually probably a bit more unusual than not. I agree. All right, here's a troubling question.

Michael. Great. Are you all, and people who have done, who do and have done what you do, are you all out of work soon because of artificial intelligence? Well, it's funny. In the green room, we were kind of talking about that, sort of. And the answer is, I think we're getting to a point where chat GPT, AI and others are going to

ultimately take over maybe some of the smaller work. Like in fact, press releases, shorter speeches, things like that. And unfortunately, I just know from experience and I sort of know where it's coming from, it's starting to integrate itself into the workroom because it's easier. It saves time. It's a simpler way to get some of the, not necessarily heavy lifting, but some of just the nonsense out of the way fast so that you can start to work towards crafting

the longer speeches that go 10, 15, 20, maybe half an hour, whatever it may be. Jared, is it easier or harder today versus, say, 30 years ago before there was an internet to be a speechwriter? That's funny, Steve. I wouldn't know. I've never written a speech in the pre-internet era. I'm just a baby.

I think when we think about the different challenges that might have existed then, sure, when I became, for example, Andrew Horvath's speechwriter, I just went on YouTube and I found everything I could find. I figured out what her mannerisms were, what her tics were, whether she liked to say folks. Does she, you know? She does. All the time.

Yes. Folks, folks, everything's folks. But this is a great example, right? That would have been really difficult a long time ago. But the flip side of this is that now I'm competing, we're competing right now against every piece of content that humanity has produced for all of time. We're competing against Molière, we're competing against Reagan, we're competing against Hawk2AGirl all at once, right?

I hope we're not competing against them. But it's a difficult place to be in, right? So you get the ease on one hand, but you do get the tradeoff of how do you possibly get somebody's attention when they have everything ever at their disposal? I don't know what's more disturbing, the fact that you mentioned her on this program, or the fact that I know who you're referring to.

I'm not sure. Anyway, anyway. Let's, a couple of minutes left here. Let's do two more things here. Michael, it's election night. Yeah. Your leader's about to go out there, and he's either going to give the we won again,

or he's going to give the we lost. Yeah. Do you only have two versions of the speech on election night? No, although I didn't do it, no, good lord. You have more than that. More than two. You have various options. Now, again, it's based on the comfort of the speech on election night? No, although I didn't do it, no, good lord, you have more than that. More than two.

You have various options. Now, again, it's based on the comfort of the leader as well. But generally, you have way more than two. So you would have majority, minority, you know, working coalition, do I resign that evening because of the poor showing, or whatever. You have a whole variety of things on hand. Because yes, there have been obviously speeches made

where you have to scrape it all together at the last minute and you have a big kerfuffle that looks terrible. And it does happen, and it's not a right-left thing, it just happens. But generally speaking, you try to make sure that every single possibility is covered. And by doing so, you have at least, I don't know, four, five, six, maybe more speeches on end, just in case.

Jenny, were you responsible for writing some election night speeches for Justin Trudeau? Well, I was responsible for writing some drafts. I think the speech writers in the 2015 war room, I think they kind of humored us and said, sure, you can write these speeches. And then ultimately, it was written by different folks at a different level. But to Michael's point, we did have, I have a memory that we had five, I can only remember the content of four though. We had majority win, minority win. We had a concession speech and we had it's 2.30 in the morning and it's late and we don't know how this is going to land. We'll talk again in a couple of hours. But definitely, definitely never just the two.

Gotcha. Jared, the greatest political speech you ever saw, not necessarily that you wrote, but that you've ever seen. I'm going to definitely say in 2008, I started my career as a baby organizer for Barack Obama. And his stump speech in that election, there's a little vignette where he talks about being fired up, ready to go. If you're out there, please Google fired up, ready to go Obama.

It's worth the time. It's definitely my favorite thing. I've seen 100 versions of this stump, and every time still gets me. Michael. There's a lot of good current ones, but I go older. Because you said anything, and I see stuff on tape as well. Winston Churchill, June of 1940, his speech in the House of Commons, you know,

we shall fight in the fields. That is to me one of the greatest masterpieces written, not because it was a conservative like me, it was the way it was done and basically the cadence that he actually said it. It's a magnificent speech. If people haven't seen it, shame on you, go take a look for it. It's wonderful. Jenny. My favorite is actually a Ronald Reagan speech from 1984. It's called The Boys of Pointe d'Occ. It's difficult for me to even talk about this speech without getting choked up.

It's the speech that he delivered in France on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. And interestingly enough, to circle back to an earlier point, it was written by Peggy Noonan, who had worked in the White House for three months, but had not yet met the president when she wrote what I think was one of the best speeches of the 20th century. Well, of course, you're all wrong. The answer is, the correct answer is Ted Sorensen, JFK, inaugural 1961, ask not, and you know the rest of it. It's a good one too. What do you mean it's a good one too? It's kind of this, kind of.

I want to thank Jenny Armstrong, Michael Tobe, and Jared Walker for coming on the program tonight and sharing your views of speech writing, which are getting quite a workout these days during this election campaign. Thanks so much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.