Adam Frankel, overachiever

News flash: Favs isn’t Barack Obama’s only speechwriter.

The president’s team of scribes also includes Adam Frankel, who is profiled in the latest edition of his alma mater’s newspaper, the Daily Princetonian.

Since graduating six years ago, Frankel has studied at the London School of Economics on a Fulbright scholarship; worked for Gordon Brown, John Kerry and Obama; and helped Ted Sorensen and Rep. Patrick Murphy write books.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be hanging from the rafters.

The war on ‘GWOT’ continues

Here we go again.

After lots of back and forth, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has weighed in on the Obama administration’s use of the term “global war on terror,” either, Al Kamen reports in today’s Washington Post.

Clinton, speaking to reporters on her way to a conference in The Hague, said, “The administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself, obviously.” She added that there had been no formal policy directive to do so. “It’s just not being used,” she said.

OK, Obama administration. Madame Secretary has spoken. Let this be the final nail in the coffin.

Gregg the comic

Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, cracked wise during a speech on the Senate floor yesterday, Jillian Jorgensen reports in the Manchester Union Leader.

The punchline: “Franklin Pierce.”

Oh, those wacky fiscal conservatives.

Obama Opens Up

Barack Obama has always included personal stories in his speeches, but now that he’s president, he feels comfortable telling audiences things that he probably wouldn’t have said as a candidate.

So reports Carol E. Lee at Politico.

“I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries,” he told the Arab news organization Al-Arabiya in an interview.

That comment would not likely have been heard during 2008, when Obama was laboring to combat an inaccurate but widespread perception that he was himself Muslim.

His remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast were similarly self-referential.

“I was not raised in a particularly religious household,” he said. “I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, and grandparents who were nonpracticing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion.”

Obama added, “I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college.”

Multiple platforms, one message

Peggy Noonan knocked President Obama last week for “trying to keep up with the news cycle with less and less to say.” True, but as Joe Garofoli and Carla Marinucci point out in a smart piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Obama doesn’t have much choice.

With no dominant mass-media player – the major news networks and national newspapers are shrinking, aging audiences and most online channels are too niche-focused – Obama must reach out to audiences on multiple platforms in multiple ways. … The key to Obama succeeding in this evolving media landscape: No matter where he appears, his message has to remain consistent and his tone upbeat and unflappable.

‘Legacy’ lunacy

Drop everything and read Daniel Gross’s terrific Newsweek column on the retardation of the word “legacy” in the economic crisis.

Remember those toxic assets? The poorly performing mortgages and collateralized debt obligations festering on the books of banks that made truly execrable lending decisions? In the latest federal bank-rescue plan, they’ve been transformed into “legacy loans” and “legacy securities” —safe for professional investors to purchase, provided, of course, they get lots of cheap government credit.

This bit of “financial linguistics,” as Newsweek’s headline writers refer to it, isn’t all that surprising. After all, Gross points out that the Big Three auto companies now refer to its pension and health-care commitments as “legacy costs.”

Obama vs. Blair

Christopher Howse makes an interesting comparison in a column on Winston Churchill’s speaking style in today’s Daily Telegraph.

At his inauguration Mr Obama used some Churchillian periods: “The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood.” Tony Blair would have made that: “Capital abandoned. Enemy advancing. Snow stained with blood.” It would have slid down smoothly – but then slipped away from the memory.

FYI: GWOT isn’t DOA at the OMB. OK?

Sigh.

The Office of Management and Budget isn’t dropping the term “global war on terror” after all, the incomparable Al Kamen reports in today’s Washington Post.

More prompt and circumstance

See what I mean?

No sooner had I written that Bob Cesca’s HuffPo post on teleprompters deserved to be the last word on the subject than I discovered Michael Gerson’s column in today’s Washington Post.

But it is a mistake to argue that the uncrafted is somehow more authentic. Those writers and commentators who prefer the unscripted, who use “rhetoric” as an epithet, who see the teleprompter as a linguistic push-up bra, do not understand the nature of presidential leadership or the importance of writing to the process of thought.

So let’s hope this is the last word on the subject.

The Great War on Teleprompters

I have a bad habit of not scrolling down when I visit the Huffington Post, which is why I probably missed Bob Cesca’s terrific post on President Obama and teleprompters, which does a better job putting this “issue” in context than anything else I’ve read.

In politics and the media, teleprompters are about as commonplace as microphones and people named “O’Donnell.” Some use a teleprompter, some use paper, some use cue cards, some use both. Really, what difference does it make whether prepared remarks are read from paper or Perspex? Either way, we’re talking about prepared text printed on a readable medium. The teleprompter isn’t some space-age interdimensional portal that automatically injects your audience with nitrous oxide and mild doses of heroin, drugging them into an involuntary state of euphoric torpor. It simply allows the reader to deliver a speech without looking down at the podium. That’s all.

I’d like to think this is the last word on the prompter controversy, but I’m not that naïve.