WORDSMITHING:

The Man Who Puts Words in the President's Mouth Defends His Style (ELISABETH BUMILLER, 1/17/05, NY Times)

Michael Gerson, President Bush's 40-year-old speechwriter, had a mild heart attack in mid-December that put him in intensive care for two days. The timing could not have been worse for Mr. Gerson: it was the height of speechwriting season, and Mr. Bush's second Inaugural Address and 2005 State of the Union address were menacingly close.

So two short weeks later, Mr. Gerson was back in the office full time to deal with a boss who has never taken a hands-off approach to his speechwriters' prose.

As recently as late last week, Mr. Gerson said, the president was making significant revisions almost daily to final drafts of the Inaugural Address. Mr. Bush does not write large portions of his speeches himself, but he does like to aggressively prune and to second- and third-guess.

"He reads it in the evening and he'll usually have changes the next day," Mr. Gerson said in an interview on his cellphone on Friday as he paced the halls in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. "He will take out whole sentences that he thinks are repetitive or interrupt the flow when he's reading it aloud. And then he'll want some explanatory material added."

Mr. Gerson would not preview the substance of the speech, which is certain to include the kind of religious language that Mr. Gerson, an evangelical Christian, is known for. But he did say the president would set out the big themes of his foreign and domestic policies in Thursday's Inaugural Address and follow up with details in his State of Union address early next month.

Although Mr. Bush is expected to put forth an ambitious social agenda focused on his "ownership society," a slogan summing up a Republican philosophy that promises people more financial control over their lives, the campaign against terrorism will be central in his remarks.

"It was very important for leaders like Truman and Kennedy at the beginning of the cold war to explain directly to the American people what the stakes of the war were and how the government was going to proceed," Mr. Gerson said. "We're in an analogous situation: we're at the beginning of another generational struggle. It's to some extent a requirement of leadership for the president to inform Americans about that struggle and how we will proceed."

George Bush's insistence on only giving speeches he feels comfortable with has already produced a body of presidential rhetoric that even Ronald Reagan couldn't rival.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 18, 2005 1:45 PM