Reading Algren beside the natural gas flame

Besides English professors, speechwriters are just about the only group of people left in America on whom one can rely to know, any more, who Nelson Algren is.

It was Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm that I was reading during my week off between Christmas and New Year's, in between keeping my baby girl from burning herself on the pilot light of the gas fireplace in my condominium, which is a 10-minute walk from Division Street and Milwaukee Avenue, where all the Algren action is.

As I chaffed at one more errand that reared up, on the Monday after Christmas預 visit to the current alderman of the ward that houses Algren's setting, to report a political story for a local newspaper擁t struck me that my life here in Chicago, however narrowly focused, is at least pretty well integrated.

Integrated, that is, with everything except my professional (and thanks to this blog, frequent) relationship with speechwriters who make persuasive words for saints and scoundrels alike, in business and politics both. And what about all the mercenary corporate freelancing I do to keep the low-fat bacon on the Crate & Barrell table? I'm quite sure I don't work for any scoundrels at the moment, but if someone offers me a dollar a word, I presume him innocent until he proves himself guilty.

In a scene in the Algren book, a Division Street informant is defending his trade to the Division Street hustlers upon whom he informs. "My business is everybody's business擁nformin' is a racket like everythin' else. Anythin' that pays ain't nothin' to be ashamed of, one racket's as good as the next. A man who's ashamed of his racket is a man who's ashamed of his mother. The only thing a man got a right to be ashamed of these days is bein' broke. Get yours, Piggy-O. I'm gettin' mine. We'll go to town together."

There.

I am one.

The "missed opportunity" of the tsunami

Last night on CNBC's normally awful show, Scarborough Country, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnacle destroyed some liberal pundit who was dumb enough to go on and repeat that President Bush's failure to go on TV and express the U.S.'s heartfelt sadness immediately after the tsunami was a "missed opportunity."

I don't have to tell you what Barnacle said. You can imagine. 150,000 dead? An opportunity? And so on.

But the truth is, Ronald Reagan would have made a speech from his own ranch within a day or two, and a beautiful Peggy Noonan classic, at that.

And the truth is, I was wondering for several days: Where the hell is Bush? (Weren't you?)

But the truth is, also: Let's all shut up about Bush. Let's shut up about
Bush's tireless critics. Let's shut up about "opportunities." Let's shut up
about what a wonderful and generous people Americans really are, after all.

This is a time to be quiet and listen and think and mourn and hope.

I wonder if we Americans have it in us.

Letters: Remember them?
REMEMBER them

Yesterday I got from a friend of mine an eight-page handwritten letter on loose-leaf paper. I tried to read it standing up. That simply did not work; the handwriting, though not bad, made it impossible to scan. It forced me to read. READ.

Which I started to think that maybe I haven't done in several years.

So I poured a glass of wine and followed my friend's hand through five or six subjects before reaching his apologetic conclusion, "This is the longest letter I've written longhand in at least a year. Let's attribute the fuck ups in it to an atrophied writing arm rather than an atrophied brain, OK?"

I once kept track of how many e-mails that pass through this computer. I discovered that I send 1,000 e-mails a month and receive many more than that.

Getting this single, solitary letter was like getting an old prized possession that I never knew I had.

I sent Pat an e-mail telling him so.

White House chief speechwriter: Gerson out, McGurn in

Newsweek reports that President Bush's chief speechwriter Michael Gerson will step aside after the inauguration to take on a "policy role," something only people inside the Beltway and West Wing-watchers can even contemplate.

Being neither myself, a policy job sounds like a nice rest, which Gerson no
doubt deserves after four years of cranking out--or supervising the cranking
out of--more speeches and sets of remarks than business days in which to
crank them.

Gerson's replacement will be Wall Street Journal editorial-page writer
William McGurn. About him, all Newsweek said was that he's a "first rate writer and a familiar name in the Bush White House," who had been wooed a number of times during the president's first term, but who only recently said yes.

SN applauds Gerson his hard work and his general excellence for another. Though his speeches didn't contain immortal lines, he wrote some beauties when only beauties would do. The speech to the joint session of Congress shortly after Sept. 11 comes to mind as Gerson's finest hour.

And with a thousand critics ready to pounce on every presidential word, only
a few regrettable scripted ones got through (unfortunately, three in a row:
"axis of evil").

How did Gerson survive four years of White House writing pressure? We've got two theories, one spiritual and the other earthly:

1. He shared the president's deep religious faith.
2. He often got out of the hothouse to write in a Starbucks around the corner.

How will McGurn survive? That's probably what McGurn is wondering right now.

More on this story here and in the next issue of Speechwriter's Newsletter.

What communicators know that other people don't know (Part I)

Speechwriters and other communicators are often accused of putting on an air of superiority. They are often guilty.

"I've tried to tell the CEO that people don't want to hear him yammer for 45 minutes during a one-hour town hall meeting," the speechwriter will harrumph. "He just doesn't get it."

Or, as Edelman Public Relations' CEO Richard Edelman put it in his blog recently, "[Communicators] are in touch with dissonant voices such as non-governmental organizations. We can balance the needs of global marketing and local culture. We value the input of employees as partners in building great companies. We have a different mindset, in which relationships and listening are more important than selling and marketing. In short, we are the soft power advocates (to use a phrase invented by Prof. Joseph Nye at Harvard), who believe in attraction and persuasion rather than the hard power attributes of force and compulsion."

Have you ever heard such insufferable boorishness in your life? Of course you have: In every keynote speech of every communication conference you've ever attended.

As for the people who hire communicators and the colleagues from other disciplines who have to work with us, they don't give a rat's ass about "soft power" and "hard power." They respond to our arrogance with a question: "What is it exactly that communicators 'get' that other people don't?"

Here's the honest answer: Communicators know who Nelson Algren is. They know how to format a press release. They know how to write that press release in a way that won't embarrass the organization before those other undeserving snobs: journalists.

But of course that's not the reason communicators are arrogant. They are arrogant because they believe熔r are thought to believe葉hat they are the only people in the organization who know how to communicate.

I think what we fail to understand is that, no matter how we express that particular belief謡hether by words or by actions擁t is deeply offensive to all "non-communicators."

Every single person in the world spends most of his or her psychic energy trying, with varying levels of success, to communicate. With husbands or wives, kids and neighbors. With bosses, with underlings, with dotted-line reports. With store clerks and car salesmen, handymen, house-sitters and dog-walkers, not to mention the dog himself.

It is psychologically impossible for a person to get through the day thinking of him- or herself as a rotten communicator.

Hence, nobody wants to cede to you the title of superior communicator. Nobody wants to and nobody will.

Instead, they want to trap you in the slightest miscommunication or misunderstanding and they want to snort, "Ha! She's a professional communicator and she can't even communicate."

Communication is not a core competency that any engineer, accountant, lawyer or even marketing executive will respect as worthy of the same hundred thousand that he or she makes.

In short, communicators start the game behind the eight ball.

Now: Why do some communicators win the game anyway? I'll weigh in on that in my next post. Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear your ideas.

What communicators know that other people don't know (Part II)

We have established預ctually, I have simply said it, making it, at least in my blog, an unassailable truth, unless, of course, my readers choose to assail it葉hat, however great the "communication" knowledge of a professional communicator, no one in the organization will ever credit him or her with true expertise in this art.

So what does the truly successful communicator do? He or she reminds people of specific facts that they already know about communication.

Facts that all parents, all teachers, all cocktail party raconteurs know � facts that businesspeople and politicians know, but often need to be reminded of in the gentlest and humblest of ways, by their speechwriters.

Facts like:

� People love to hear the sound of their own voice and they want desperately to be heard. (So let them talk.)

� People like stories. (So tell them.)

� People need to be shown, not told. (So give them examples.)

Things like that. Things a smart fifth-grader knows.

Do communicators really deserve to get paid just for remembering all that basic stuff that our colleagues seem to forget in their desire to protect the company, protect their careers, make themselves look big?

No. We deserve big bucks only to the extent that we use our precious communication expertise to communicate to our clients, first.

We deserve big bucks only if they "get it." As long as they don't get it, we deserve the small bucks we usually get.

Meanwhile, as we puff ourselves up with claims of strategic expertise and demands for invitations to high-level meetings, it seems to me we should simultaneously cultivate genuine humility.

What do we know that nobody else knows? Not too damned much. And that is a fact we need to be reminded of frequently.

(And luckily, we are.)

Corporate daycare? Not my first choice!

The Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for in America list just came out, and we know we're in for a few weeks of thumb-sucking stories that amount to dull lists of employee benefits.

The leading employee benefit--the one, that if you offer it, you're
practically guaranteed to get on the Fortune list--CORPORATE DAYCARE.

I suppose I'd send my daughter to corporate daycare if it was my only option. But I have to say: "Corporate childcare," like "corporate culture" and "corporate communication" and "corporate life," seems to me to be an oxymoron.

How rich an experience is my daughter going to have in a "corporate environment"--another oxymoron--with a "corporate childcare professional" (another!)?

My 14-month-old daughter Scout gets babysat all day in an old three-flat in the inner city of Chicago next door to the school where my wife teaches. The daycare professional is a woman who knows how to raise kids because she's raised a bunch of them.

We don't agree with the woman all the time, and she doesn't agree with us. (For instance, she is 100 percent puzzled and totally annoyed by our request that Scout not eat sugar; but she goes along, most of the time.)

I know this may not be the ideal environment. Sometimes I worry that by a childhood development perspective, we could do a little better for Scout. (Is the TV on too much? Are there dynamic learning opportunities?)

And as she gets older, I'm sure we'll find different places for her to spend the day while we're working--places that fit her developing social and developmental needs.

But if I had to choose between where she's going now and a corporate daycare center--at least the kind of antiseptic, politically correct, safety-first, sense-of-humor-last corporate daycenter I imagine--that's a no-brainer.

Give me corporations for money. Give me mothers for daycare.

Canadian CEOs aren't embracing blogging as
idiotically as their American counterparts

The world of Canadian business had some good news last week, and it had some bad news.

The bad news, as reported by ProgressiveGrocer.com: "Wal-Mart named Canada's best retail employer."

The good news, according to Canada's National Post(and brought to our attention by Shel Holtz): "Lists of chief executive bloggers ... show there
are many more in the United States than in Canada."

As sad as that piece of Wal-Mart news is謡e try and fail to imagine the scene in the back room at Canada's worst retail employer葉he notion that any sizeable number of CEOs are going to write and sustain interesting, candid, interactive blogs is even sadder.

CEOs are too busy to exchange an e-mail with their speechwriter, let alone compose their own blogs. CEOs are too nervous and careful to say anything truly interesting in their blogs. Hell, many CEOs are too out of touch with customers who make less than seven figures to say anything that makes sense to ANYBODY.

GM has started a CEO blog. I read the first one, last week or the week before; I can't remember what it said, only that it read like something some hip speechwriter weedled out of him.

Edelman PR's Dick Edelman does a CEO blog; last week, he commented on the Ketchum/Williams/No Child Left Behind disgrace; his courageous take was that the thing gave PR a bad name but that he knows Dave Drobis, the CEO of Ketchum, and he's just sure Dave wouldn't knowingly condone thing like that.

(To his credit, Edelman later expressed his disappointment with Ketchum's lame public response to this crisis. At least we think he's disappointed in Ketchum; he didn't name Ketchum, saying only he was disappointed in "several key members of the PR establishment.")

David Kistle, the chairman of the International Association of Business
Communicators, launched his cool blog in October. He's done seven boring entries in three-and-a-half months, and the only interest he's generated in the blogosphere or out has been from tech-savvy (and sometimes tech-obsessed) IABCers bellyaching in their blogs about Kistle's lame blog.

In the National Post article, some hipster goof named Robin Hopper is quoted as saying that blogs put a human face on the corporation. Hopper is the blog-happy CEO of a great Canadian corporation that you've surely heard of.

The Royal Bank of Canada? No. Suncor? No. Wal-Mart Canada? No.

Actually, it's that august institution known to all the world as iUpload.

Show me five CEOs of companies that don't have a capital letter in the middle of their name or technology in their portfolio, doing a truly interesting blog for more than a month, and I'll eat my hat.

Meanwhile, I預 professional writer with very little to do all day but try to entertain a bunch of fellow writers who don't get out much either謡ill trudge forward on my lonely struggle to do an interesting blog myself.

Who to insult: Wal-Mart, or Canada?
May I suggest: Canada

In my post yesterday, I took a swipe at Wal-Mart and Canada both.

It's safer to insult Canada than it is to insult Wal-Mart.

In fact, insulting Canada is one of the safest things anyone can do.

Insulting Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might get you a voice mail like this one, received by Austin American-Statesman columnist John Kelso, who criticized the PR/advertising blitz the retailer recently launched to defend itself from Yankee newspaper columnists and Chicago-based speechwriting bloggers.

Apparently Kelso is, in fact, a Yankee. And he reports that he got this gem of a voice mail from a reader:

"Kelso, you're pitiful as a broke-(%^&*) dog sitting out in the middle of the street howlin'. Are you going to be a pro-left Yankee hemorrhoid? Are you ever gonna settle in? You know, a pro-left Yankee hemorrhoid. Those of us that was born here and raised in Texas, heh heh, that's what we think of you. You come down, but you'll never go back to (New) Hampshire on your own. Aw, that column about Wal-Mart. Yep, are you gonna be a South Austin Bubba, or are you gonna be one of those elitist snobs that lives in Hyde Park or Travis Heights?

"You sound like you're worshipping at the throne of 'Putz' Sulzberger in this damn thing here. What about if you were some poor single mother with three or four kids living in a trailer house? They don't shop at Williams-Sonoma and Saks, Bubba. You pitiful (%#&*$). You'd be funny if you weren't kinda dangerous. I hope those bikers out at Beverly's drag you out back and . . . throw you in the Dumpster."

You don't suppose those bikers out at Beverly's are into reading blogs, do you?

Bush's second inaugural might be a winner,
might be a loser, but will be remembered

After a weird stumble in which he called Communism a "shipwreck" and the years of peace between the Cold War and Sept. 11 a "sabbatical," President Bush hit it out of the park with a plainly written speech謡e think the last written by outgoing chief speechwriter Mike Gerson葉hat promised a lot.

He said we're going to wipe out dictators and tyrants everywhere and spread freedom around the world. "Liberty," he promised, "will come to those who love it."

(No doubt, most conservatives crossed their arms and said to themselves, how exactly are you going to do that?)

And he talked with surprising directness about how our nation should help its weakest members. "Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another," he said, adding, "Even the unwanted have worth."

(No doubt, most liberals sat back and listened to this RFK stuff and said, "Sounds great, George. It just doesn't sound like YOU.")

None of us will know how good this speech was until we see how it sounds four years from now and more from the perspective of either a freer world and a more compassionate nation--or the drearier opposite.

JFK's inaugural sounded better as years went by; Nixon's second inaugural sounded worse; and other inaugurals were all but forgotten entirely.

But for the most part, Bush's speech sounded awfully good today, and its boldness emboldens me to make at least one prediction: This speech will be remembered.

Speechwriters, do you agree?

Measuring the effectiveness of speeches—
on a scale from one to "I think it went over well"

I guess I hadn't realized how tired I had become. How tired of the charade, the pretense, the phony hope.

In response to a speechwriter who e-mailed me last week looking to hear "how others measure speech effectiveness (other than 'I got a paycheck.')."

I've been asked that question a thousand times.

This time, I didn't think. I just e-mailed. I wrote: "Don't you think there are some things we cannot measure? Don't you think the 'effectiveness' of a speech is one of those things? What would happen if we resigned ourselves to the fact that: We cannot measure the effectiveness of a speech?"

My God, it felt good just to say it straight out. Uncut by the standard caveats about specific audience reactions that you CAN measure. Undisguised by some bullshit about how it "depends on the kind of speech you're giving." And best of all, undecorated by the obligatory expression of that fond hope that someday some genius will discover how to measure the effectiveness of a speech. (And, for that matter, a novel, a painting, a funny remark.)

How liberating it felt to come right up to the edge of flat-out saying once and for all that no one will ever be able to measure the effectiveness of speeches. Speechwriters, I repeat my question.

What would happen if we resigned ourselves to the fact that: We cannot measure the effectiveness of a speech?

Speechwriter's Conference brings 230 of
my best friends to Washington, D.C.

It's an unfortunate reality that I spend the vast majority of the year limited to phone conversations and e-mails with speechwriters.

Except for three days in February, when I'm surrounded by a couple hundred of them at the conference.

With whom I try to hold coherent conversations.

While trying to ascertain whether that's a look of confidence or blissful ignorance on the face of the 18-year-old hotel AV staffer who's running the soundboard.

It's always a fun week. The speechwriters tell me they are joyful預stonished, really葉o have a conference dedicated just for them. And I tell them I'm joyful and astonished they've come.

It's always an unsettling week. I finally meet people I've been corresponding with on e-mail for years and find myself so ruffled by the look in their eye that says I don't look anything like they imagined, that I can't remember how I imagined them.

It's always an exhausting week. Every year I tell myself I'm going to go to bed early each night so that I feel my very best during the day. Every year, it's midnight on Thursday in the Mayflower's lobby bar and we're saying: "One more and we gotta go."

It's always an incredibly stimulating week. Like most attenders, I scribble notes like crazy, too, and leave with a fat notebook and ideas coming out of my ears.

And I never sleep more soundly than I do on the two-and-a-half hour flight back to Chicago.

I'm looking forward to seeing you there.

The trouble with giving a provocative speech:
Sometimes, it provokes people

President Bush wanted his second inaugural address to sound BOLD, darn it!

He kept telling his speechwriter Mike Gerson that he wanted this speech to be his "freedom speech." Gerson, who coincidentally had a mild heart attack shortly before writing the freedom speech, obliged.

For his last speech before leaving the speechwriting job to take a policy position, Gerson produced a 2,000-worder wherein the words freedom and liberty appeared about 50 times. That means, 2.5% of the words Bush spoke were either "freedom" or "liberty." And the other 97.5% of the words was filler.

It was a great speech. For a barroom.

A few minutes after the speech ended用erhaps eager to sound like a balanced pundit悠 posted this winning analysis: "None of us will know how good this speech was until we see how it sounds four years from now." That sentence might have been more accurate had I said, "four hours from now." More to the point, my analysis might have been more accurate if I had simply waited four hours to weigh in with my terribly important opinion.

Now the president and his aides and his flunkies and his father have spent the last week taking back anything and everything in the speech that freaked out Republicans and Democrats alike.

And mostly Republicans. Even the usually reliable Republican shill Peggy Noonan scoffed at Bush's promise to make the entire world perfect. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, she said the speech "left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. ... To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists ... President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance ... This world is not heaven. The president's speech seemed rather heavenish."

I think it's safe to say that when Peggy Noonan doesn't like your inaugural address and you're a Republican president, you screwed up.

Coming out of this inaugural fiasco are two big lessons: One, that's applicable to all speechwriters and another, that applies only to outgoing White House scribes with heart conditions.

All speechwriters: When the speaker wants you to make him sound bold, you'd better ask him if he's ready to back up your strong words. In short, you can't fake bold.

White House scribes: When you're weak from a heart attack and you're on your way out of the job anyway, maybe the new guy should write the second inaugural. He's the one who has to live with it for the next four years.