Tagged: Jimmy Carter
Editor-in-chief
A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing:
Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo:
The volume of Obama’s editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says “This has always been our history.” Obama changes it to, “This has always been the history of our progress.” A different, more interesting, and more original-sounding thought.
Those wishing to track President Obama’s edits in detail can view an enormous version of the photo here.
Obama’s first bad speech?
James Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama’s landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop.
Fallow’s argument is “probabilistic:” Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy: the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches.
Here is Faulkner’s remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
