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BY SARAH DONOVAN

In print | Published April 22, 2004

When the media criticized former presidential candidate Wesley Clark for slipping up on his position on abortion, his speechwriter Josh Gottheimer jokingly said, “Clark attacks Clark. Stop the lies!”

In his lecture “Writing in Politics,” Gottheimer told a crowd in the Scheuer Room Tuesday afternoon that one of the most important elements of speechwriting was consistency.

To address this, Gottheimer spends hours reading old speeches by the political candidate he is working for.

Starting this week, that candidate will be Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

“Just because you work for Clark or Clinton doesn’t mean I’m going to have any idea how to write for Kerry,” Gottheimer said. “I will write a little differently for him, and he will either like me or fire me. I may be back here in a few weeks.”

Another key to speechwriting, Gottheimer said, is keeping the language and message simple. “Listening to a speech is not reading ‘War and Peace,’” he said. His early work at the White House was often simple. “As the junior speechwriter, I always wrote the ‘Turkey Pardon’” speech for Thanksgiving Day, he said.

Gottheimer emphasized that there was always a need for speechwriters by telling an anecdote about a CEO of a large company who called him and said he needed to give a toast at his daughter’s wedding. Gottheimer asked the CEO, “What would you like to say about your daughter?” and the CEO responded, “I don’t know. Do you have any ideas?”

“Some people have no idea how to write a speech,” Gottheimer said, “but it’s just like the conversations you have in the coffee lounge here. You pull from each other and those ideas.”

Gottheimer was brought to Swarthmore by the Writing Associates Program as a part of its Spring Speaker Series. The series began last year with a lecture by Nation columnist Katha Pollitt to show students that “writing has implications and relevance beyond just the classroom setting,” Writing Center intern Chris Miller said.

The WA program wanted to bring Gottheimer to campus because he has been “active in the political arena quite recently and has insight on what’s going on now and how writing is involved in that,” Miller said.

Miller hoped the lectures would help correct a misperception on campus about writing.

“There’s a perception of — ‘Oh, OK, it’s an exercise, and it’s important for class,’” Miller said, but the Spring Speaker Series emphasized that “a grasp of the writing process is crucial to all professions.”

Writing Associates Program Director and English professor Jill Gladstein said she hoped Gottheimer would talk about “not just the speech, but writing the speech.”

Many students attended Gottheimer’s lecture because of their own interest in politics. “It’s sobering to hear how he only slept three hours a day. It doesn’t make the job sound that attractive,” College Democrats Co-President Patrick Hart ’06 said.

Ryan Budish ’04 attended the lecture to pick up some tips on speech writing for the graduation address he will give next month. “I really liked the anecdotes about the State of the Union speech and the frantic pace of what he has to do,” Budish said.

Writing Associate Alison Landry ’04 said Gottheimer “made a good point about writing for the audience, depending on who that was.”

Rachel Burstein ‘04 disagreed with Gottheimer’s suggestion that men and women often have different levels of sensitivity on certain issues. “I can see the need for more women speechwriters, but the rationale given was dubious,” Burstein said.

In reaction to a need for more women speechwriters, Landry said, “I think that’s true for politics in general. I hope that changes and more women get into it, and the same goes for minorities.”

The “Writing in Politics” lecture was the second of three events in the Spring Speaker Series.

The series concludes tomorrow with a two-hour workshop led by Peter Friedman ‘58 called “Getting Your Work Into Print.” A reading from Friedman’s recently published book, “Ideal Marriage,” will follow the workshop, according to The Weekly News.

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