WAS VALERIE JARRETT READING A PROMPTER MOVIE
WAS VALERIE JARRETT READING A PROMPTER TV

Smith in 19, and Bill Clinton, who introduced Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988. Roosevelt, who delivered rousing nomination speeches for Alfred E. They knew the promising history of past keynote speakers, including Franklin D. And Gibbs, a former Kerry campaign staffer, worked the phones to his former colleagues.

WAS VALERIE JARRETT READING A PROMPTER MOVIE

The team composed an eight-minute video that included excerpts from Obama’s Illinois Senate primary victory speech and campaign photos set to music from the documentary movie When We Were Kings, featuring Muhammad Ali. Obama and his aides had pursued the speaking slot with intensity and purpose. According to David Mendell, there was a clear rapport between the two: “It’s Kerry kind of looking at him and picking up tricks from the rookie.” Plus, on a personal level, Kerry and Obama had hit it off during a joint campaign swing in spring 2004, first at a vocational center on Chicago’s West Side and then at a downtown fund-raiser at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. But ultimately, as Cahill put it, “I was convinced he was going to be the best.”

It was true that the campaign was concerned about Obama’s position on the war in Iraq-Kerry had initially voted to authorize military action. Illinois was also a critical Senate seat. Senate included the now familiar “Yes, we can”). He was eloquent and youthful and delivered the right optimistic message (his campaign speeches for the U.S. In the end, the campaign concluded that Obama was the politically wise choice he would help them attract African American voters, a demographic that had been lagging in the polls. The group narrowed their list of appealing Democratic Party politicos to Governors Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Tom Vilsack of Iowa, and Obama. A team of about a dozen convention organizers, including Cahill, the Massachusetts politico Jack Corrigan, and the campaign strategist Robert Shrum, considered their options. The Kerry campaign had thought long and hard about whom to pick for the slot. Obama wrote in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, “The process by which I was selected as keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me.” In truth, there wasn’t much mystery about it. He was so broke that the rental car facility rejected his American Express card.

WAS VALERIE JARRETT READING A PROMPTER TV

In fact, he has since reminded people that in 2000, after his failed bid for Congress, he had trouble even getting a pass onto the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and ended up watching the proceedings on a TV screen near the convention hall. Having served only in the Illinois State Senate for eight years, Obama was not a national figure by any stretch.

But he had grabbed the lead only after his well-funded Republican opponent Jack Ryan dropped out of the race in the wake of a sex scandal. Senate vacated by Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican.

True, Obama had captured the attention of people in his home state and had become the leading candidate for the Illinois seat in the U.S. On the morning of the speech, the Philadelphia Inquirer headlined, “Who the Heck Is This Guy?” After all, no one had even heard of Barack Obama before he took the podium. No one could have imagined how that seventeen-minute speech would catapult Obama into stardom and onto the national political stage and eventually into the White House itself. Not the Senate candidate himself nor his two key aides and traveling companions, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, nor Mary Beth Cahill, the campaign manager for John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president. It’s fair to say that no one could have expected what resulted from Barack Obama’s prime-time speech at the July 2004 Democratic National Convention. We look back on this speech with a passage from Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches, from the State House to the White House in which authors Mary Frances Berry and Josh Gottheimer give us a behind-the-scenes look at the craft and preparation that went into it. Twelve years ago, he made his famous keynote address at the 2004 DNC that catapulted him into the national spotlight. President Barack Obama takes the stage tonight to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. By Mary Frances Berry and Josh Gottheimer

Was valerie jarrett reading a prompter