The Power of Values: An Interview With an Obama Foreign Policy Speechwriter

The Power of Values: An Interview With an Obama Foreign Policy Speechwriter

GRI’s co-founder Basim Al-Ahmadi sat down via Zoom with Terence Szuplat, one of President Obama’s longest serving speechwriters, to discuss his fascinating role, the importance Obama placed on values & soft power, the future of US bipartisanship and other key topics.

Introduction to Terence Szuplat
One of President Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters, from 2009 to 2017,
Terence Szuplat helped conceive and draft hundreds of speeches on global security, international economics, U.S. foreign and defense policy, entrepreneurship, development, and human rights.  As a Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Director of Speechwriting at the National Security Council staff, he joined President Obama on visits to more than 40 countries.

As the deputy director of the White House Speechwriting Office in the West Wing during President Obama’s second term, Terry helped oversee and edit the work of a team of speechwriters, assisted with State of the Union addresses, and produced innovative content to reach new audiences through social media.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview

GRI
To what extent did President Obama feel that it was necessary to communicate the values and ideals of the United States in foreign policy and how difficult was it to balance the projection of soft and hard power?

Szuplat
An appreciation for the power of our example and our ideals as Americans was central to Obama’s presidency and it was central to his foreign policy. One of the things that he constantly pushed back on was this misconception that firing off missiles and invading other countries was the way to project our strength on the world stage, which too many people particularly here in Washington adhere to.

By virtue of his life and unique biography he had a real appreciation for the power of America’s story around the world. Whenever he travelled around the world as President — I was lucky enough to visit about forty or so countries with him — he would have his meetings with Presidents, Prime Ministers, business leaders etc, but he always made a point to make sure that he was engaging in some sort of outreach to the people, particularly young people. On just about every visit there would be a town hall with young people or a speech to young people – that was a chance for him to communicate directly with foreign audiences all over the world. It was an opportunity for him to share the story of the United States and talk about our strengths but also about areas where we have fallen short.

Sometimes he got criticised by folks on the right in the US who falsely claimed he travelled around the world and “apologised” for America, which they dubbed the so-called “Apology Tour”–a catchy slogan but, wrong. What the President did very deliberately, especially in countries where there was not a strong tradition of freedom of press, would be to get up and share the story of his country, but also the areas where we have at times fallen short, and where we failed to live up to our ideals. That actually became a very powerful message and lesson to audiences around the world–that great nations confront their own weaknesses and acknowledge their contradictions.

If you go to just about every speech Obama gave overseas during his presidency, he would frame the strength of our country beyond simply military or economic power. An example would be trade, which is undoubtedly important. Obama would make it clear that these trade and commercial deals would create jobs in both of our respective countries, but he wanted to go deeper and empower people to embrace entrepreneurship, and promote the freedom to start a business, to have an idea and do something with it.

With other countries like China, it is about the extraction of resources and wealth. Obama was offering partnerships that empowered people to build something and create something and so you had these incredible programmes that Obama would champion as President, such as programmes investing in young leaders, young business leaders, young entrepreneurs, young social entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia and across Africa. That is all soft power. That is not the United States coming in and being transactional, saying “we’re going to buy this from you or have you build this for us”. Instead, the message from Obama was that we want to be your partner and help you build something for your own country, create a job, create a business, hire your neighbours. Moreover, we wanted to help women owned businesses and religious, ethnic, and racial minorities that maybe do not always have the same opportunities in their countries, to own and expand their business. This notion of soft power played a key role in Obama’s foreign policy.

GRI
The world seems to welcome US interference and support but at times, also complain about it – did you feel this tension and contradiction during the Obama presidency?

Szuplat
I think the tension has been there for decades and it will probably be there for the foreseeable future. After the Vietnam War, the, the message to the US was “get out and stop interfering”. Often in our trips through Asia or Southeast Asia, by the time Obama was President, the message was, “are you really here to stay? Are you really here for the long term? Because there is this very large country {China} with a very aggressive government that is next door and they are not going away.” There is always a tension there. At any time, if there is a change in our posture in Japan or Korea, there is a question of “is the United States withdrawing?”

You are seeing that in Afghanistan right now. Overnight, we go from voices in the world saying “the United States is too involved and been there for 20 years and it is time for the US to go”, then President Biden announces that the troops will leave, and suddenly the headlines are asking “is the US rushing to leave?” There is a natural love-hate relationship with the United States in some parts of the world. There is a love for the stability that our presence and engagement can provide, but I think there are tensions that are involved with that. I think that is something that every President grapples with and I think President Obama did as well.

GRI
In this 24/7 media cycle and social media environment, did you feel that President Obama at times was frustrated that he had to react to news rather than proactively shape the narrative? As a speechwriter, who aims to help the President shape the narrative and engage the public, would you have rather had this job in the 50’s or 60’s when the media was not as fractured and before the age of social media?

Szuplat
I think every President wishes that they had a greater ability to drive the conversation and drive the agenda. In the 1950s there were three major newscasts, a handful of national newspapers and the newscast popped up every morning and evening, there was one news cycle, and you had all day to correct a story to get your side of events out there. Now it is constant, it is 24/7, it never ends, there is a whole constellation of endless publications, everybody gets a voice.

This media landscape is both a challenge and an opportunity. There are more opportunities and avenues now for a President to get their message out, for example through social media. President Obama I believe was the first President to Tweet. He made tremendous use of Facebook as President. If you want to hear the message, there are more opportunities than ever to hear it. The challenge is that there is so many other voices out there as well. This communication challenge is something that every President has struggled with in different ways and it is a challenge to navigate through a fractured media landscape that we live in and also considering public distrust of institutions, including the media.

GRI
You think they should reinstate the fireside chat {the iconic addresses given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt)?

Szuplat
Many presidents have done weekly radio addresses and it morphed into a weekly video address.

GRI
How did the West Wing Week under Obama fit in within the communication strategy?

Szuplat
The weekly “radio address” is a weekly video where the President speaks directly to the camera. The West Wing Week was a product of our press and communications team to bring people behind the scenes and to get a feeling for the emotions within the White House and insight into what the President did that particular week. Regarding the weekly radio and video address, I think that is a great example of a tool that back in the 60s, 70s and 80s was useful – it is less useful now.

GRI
How did Obama approach his speeches in terms of the speechwriting process?

Szuplat
One of the misconceptions that I think people have is that speechwriters put words into someone’s mouth. That is just not how it works. Before he ever became president, Obama had written books and had given some fantastic speeches. Through those speeches, books and interviews, Obama had set the themes of his presidency. If you go back and you look at Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 that launched him on the national stage and then you look at his final farewell address in Chicago in January of 2017, thematically it stays very consistent. As a speechwriter, you are always thinking how we could further develop the themes that Obama has already established.

To start, we would meet Obama in the Oval Office. He would share what he was thinking, but would always welcome our ideas and thoughts. For that initial meeting, the President would usually start with the high level thematics that he really wanted to lead the audience with. Or he might bring a detailed outline — for example he might have six key points that he wanted to make. After that initial meeting with the President, we would spend the next week or two or three, working with the policy experts to flesh the speech out, always remembering the guidance he gave us at the beginning of the process so that when someone says, “Hey, I think we should talk about x or y”, we would as speechwriters immediately know whether that may or may not fit with the kind of speech the President wanted to give. With any given speech you can write it 100 different ways – knowing the way that the President wants to write allows you to make those choices throughout the process and to ensure that when the speech draft goes back to the President a few days before the event, the speech is true to the guidance he provided us at the start.

GRI
President Obama always seemed to exude this sense of calm in public – was his temperament the same in private?

Szuplat
As a counterpoint, we just lived through four years where we saw the horrific consequences when someone does not have the right temperament as President.  It plays out every single day in a hundred different ways in the things they do and the things they say. Temperament is one of the things I wish people would look closer at when they cast their ballots. It is one of the hardest jobs in the world, there is immense pressure on the President of the United States – this is a person who is making decisions every day that will affect the lives of millions of people, including making military decisions where citizens are going to either live or die or emerge with wounds that will define them for the rest of their life. The President has to make those decisions with more information at hand than anyone, but it is still not enough information considering the magnitude of the decisions the President has to make.

With regards to President Obama, what you saw from the outside is, in my experience, exactly what we saw on the inside. Folks talk about “no drama Obama” – in the years that I worked for him, he never raised his voice at me. I never heard of him raising his voice at someone else. I am sure he would get frustrated at times, but I think he recognised that for him to make clear decisions based on the facts, he needed to have a team that was calm and deliberate as he was. If anyone in the world had an excuse to raise their voice or lose their cool, I think it is the President of the United States – we have seen other Presidents do that both publicly and privately. Every President has strengths and weaknesses – Obama’s strength was his ability to stay calm, remain deliberative, to focus on the facts, and make the best decision he possibly could.

GRI
How did you and your colleagues manage the pressures of working in the White House and working on such high impact events?

Szuplat
The President’s closest advisors were very good at picking people that reflected his temperament. There were certainly people at the beginning of the administration who maybe did not share his temperament or style, and they tended not to last very long. Organisations, whether they are political organisations, businesses, take on the personality of the leader. If you were quick to panic, quick to catastrophize, if you are running around like your hair is on fire, you did not fit in very well and over time those people moved on from the Obama administration.

Of the people who stayed the full eight years — I was lucky enough to be there just about the whole time — we all had similar temperaments and so if one of us started to spiral, we had great colleagues who could help pull us back and keep perspective. When there is a crisis in the world, whether it is a terrorist attack or an accident for example and you have two hours to help write the remarks that the President is going to deliver to the world, there is just no time to panic. You have to keep cool and get it done.

One of the great things about our senior speechwriters such as Jon Favreau, Ben Rhodes, and Cody Keenan, is that they did a fantastic job of bringing on people who shared the same temperament as the President. If President Obama could keep it together, if he could stay calm, under all the pressure that he was under, then we certainly did not have an excuse. He was not yelling at us, so why would you yell at your team?

He set a wonderful example. If he was not happy with our work or thought we could do better, he never tried to demoralise us, he never trashed us. He knew we had to go back as speechwriters and try again. He lived by the belief that you do not encourage someone to try again and improve a piece of work by tearing somebody down. You let them know what it is you want and give them a second chance to do it. As a person, I always appreciated that and I knew the worst thing President Obama could say to us — he would never say the speech is garbage —  was something like, “we have four days before I have to give a speech, which means we have four days to get this right”, which means we did not get it right. If Obama felt the speech was too long, he would say “this is a good six-page speech but I think it could be a great five-page speech.” That was his style, diplomatic and encouraging – he would never shame or tear people down.

GRI
How did President Obama make decisions – did he have a process and style which he relied on?

Szuplat
I was not in the room typically when he was making that final decision, but I worked with people who would sit with the President when making key decisions in the Situation Room. The consensus was that the President was extremely deliberative, he gave everybody ample opportunities to express their views – he heard people out. I do not think I ever recall hearing an advisor saying that they did not have the opportunity to make their case on a major decision. The raid against Osama Bin Laden is very well documented.  There were some people thought it was worth doing, others not. Ultimately the final decision is his. With the National Security Council, he looked to his advisors to run a very rigorous process, where there were multiple levels of review. If a decision could not be made at one level, it got moved up. Only the hardest decisions would reach the President, because if they were not the hardest, the decision would have been made by somebody else. President Obama valued a deliberative process and intellectual rigour. I suspect that is one of the reasons that President Biden has brought on Susan Rice (who served as Obama’s National Security Advisor) to lead his domestic policy council–to bring that same rigour to his policy-making process on domestic issues.

GRI
In historical context, how do you place this current environment of partisanship – there are claims that it has never been as bad, but is this is an exaggeration?

Szuplat
Yes – it is fairly common for people to say partisanship never been this bad. However, we have data and metrics to look at for this and certainly in the last 30/40 years you can see both the public and their representatives in the House and Senate are pulling apart – Democrats to the left, Republicans to the right. You could go online and look at partisanship in the House of Representatives and the Senate, what you see is a real decline in the past 20/30 years of the number of representatives and senators who are considered moderate.

There are so many reasons for this partisanship – gerrymandering being one example. There are other statistics out there about how the percentage of Americans who see the other side, as not just Americans to be disagreed with, but, but as an enemy and that is dangerous. There are many things at play here – there is partisanship, gerrymandering, the unlimited funds that go to candidates, the rise of opinion media, such as Fox News, and the rise of social media, where the natural tendencies that people have always had such as confirmation bias and only seeking out information that they agree with, is turbo charged and put on steroids, because of the way our media and social media interact.

It is so bad that 1000’s of people swarmed the US Capitol, 100’s broke through, injuring dozens of police officers. The threat of violence is already here. Some people worry about a civil war. That might be hard to fathom. However, one of the questions that we have been struggling with is “was the attack on the capital the end of something or was it the beginning of something?” We will not know the answer right now but there’s tremendous fear I think that if Trump or folks who support Trump want to go down this road again of constantly stoking outrage and anger and fear of the other, if that is the way the Republicans are going to do it, then we are looking at many years of this.

I do not see the Republican Party backing away {from this nativism}. They see the demographic changes in the country. They know that their core political base is shrinking. The numbers in the future are not on their side, and they can either try to broaden their appeal, or they double down their base and so far, they are choosing to double down on their base. And if that is the case, then we are in for an extremely difficult not just years, but decades.

GRI
Are there certain policy areas where Republicans and Democrats can work together and pass meaningful legislation? Why has it become so difficult to compromise and find common ground across the aisle?

Szuplat
Because of everything we just described already — especially voters and representatives pulling apart — there is the decline and the death of the political middle in this country, the space for bipartisanship, and the space for consensus law-making has shrunk. That does not mean bipartisanship does not exist, but there are far more incentives for political conflict than there are incentives for political compromise.

Why does Mitch McConnell {minority Republican Senate leader} not try to facilitate immigration reform for example? It is because there is very little incentive to do so within his party – there are many incentives for conflict. Only a few days ago, a key US senator from West Virginia came out and said that he does not support a particular piece of voting legislation and does not support getting rid of the filibuster which essentially gives a veto over many pieces of legislation to the minority party. This does not bode well for big compromises. Bipartisanship only works if there is a desire on both sides to reach compromise, and there is nothing to suggest that the Republican Party in its current form has any interest in doing that. An exception is probably for certain foreign policy areas, where there is widespread agreement on the threat that an aggressive China poses to the United States, especially with regards to technology. You are seeing legislation moving forward through Congress that has overwhelming support on both sides. But that is the exception.

GRI
Does the US need a unified national goal in order to make the necessary investments into infrastructure, science & development and other areas?

Szuplat
If you were to make a list of 10 moments when the United States was unified around a goal, they were almost always in response to an external threat or challenge. We celebrate the prowess of our space programme, particularly in the 1960s with landing a man on the moon. People forget that that was a race to the moon–a Cold War competition between the United States and Soviet Union. The Cold War infused everything about the space race. All the money and investment that was placed in science and development was in response to the Soviet launching the satellite Sputnik into space before we did and Americans freaked out. We also have the example of the Peace Corps (launched by JFK in the 1960’s to spread US soft power during the Cold War).

In our lifetimes, the United States was most unified after 9/11, when we suffered a horrific external attack. There are so many examples where we sometimes forget that the case that was made to American people to make large-scale investments was that “we had to beat somebody else or defend ourselves”. For example, the legislation {which has since the date of this interview passed the Senate} that is working its way through Congress includes new resources for technology and investments in artificial intelligence (AI). That is very much in response to the aggressive behaviour of China, and people on all sides of the political aisle agree that a China-led world order is not the kind of world we want to live in.

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