The Bush Doctrine on Speech Writing
In his entertaining memoir Speech*Less, speech writer Matt Latimer reveals something about the speeches developed for President G.W. Bush. By the way, he was one of the speech writers.
‘I quickly discovered the answer to a question I’d been asked by people since I’d arrived at the White House: why did the President’s speeches always seem to be so bad? It turned out it was intentional. On my very first day, Bill McGurn and Marc Thiessen both told me that the president was “okay” with a flat speech. All he cared about was logic and organization, not eloquence. As a student at Yale, the President had learned that all speeches should have an introduction, three points, a peroration, and a conclusion. I didn’t even know what a peroration was. The president wasn’t as insanely rigid about this approach, though, as Bill and the other writers thought he was. I’d read many of his finer speeches in his first term, and they rarely followed this pattern. But pushing the President to like a speech that was written differently was too risky. The writers all lived in fear that he’d blow up at them, which on occasion he’d been known to do. So in the quest for rigid logic—point A to point B to point C to conclusion—language that satisfied the President in one speech would be cut and pasted into the next speech and then the next.’
Matt decides that, since he didn’t go to Yale but rather attended the University of Michigan, he was not obliged to follow the routine.
The Bush Doctrine of speech writing sounds suspiciously like the models I’ve seen being peddled to the business community.
Having a model is good, because it saves time and helps you think about structure. But slavish devotion to models creates M&M: monotony and mediocrity.
Look for a way to use your model as a spring board to create an EXPERIENCE for your listeners.