Becoming Presidential

For the past two years, in my junior and senior years of college, I’ve been studying in the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. During this time, I’ve also been a part of the University of Michigan’s Minor in Writing program. For my Minor in Writing Capstone project, I decided to bridge the two disciplines. Speechwriting became that bridge.

 

Every presidential election cycle, candidates for their party’s nomination are scrutinized on whether or not they appear “presidential,” an imprecise and abstract term that translates roughly to mean that they seem enough like the other people who have previously occupied the Oval Office. A candidate can naturally seem presidential — in the way they carry themselves, in the way they speak, in what they say — but they can also prove themselves to be it.

 

In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama delivered a speech on race at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The speech, entitled “A More Perfect Union,” was both a response to controversy surrounding the candidate’s former pastor, as well as a meditation on race relations, present and past, in the United States. The speech was a resounding success: it’s often credited as the moment that the young, fresh-faced Senator became presidential, and is sometimes lauded as the speech that made him president.  

 

I was interested in exploring how a speech like that might be constructed. For this project, I’ve attempted to write one myself. Now, I do not purport to be Barack Obama, nor did I seek to emulate “A More Perfect Union.” Rather, I wanted to see how a candidate’s vision and values could be presented to demonstrate that that candidate is indeed "presidential."

 

Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the candidate for whom I chose to write, was (at the time I chose to write for him) among the least presidential candidates in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination. A number of factors contributed to this, not the least of which were his youth and limited years in government. Since then, he has seen a significant rise in the polls, and, just last week, Politico published an article with the headline: “How Mayor Pete Started to Look Presidential.” Clearly, he hasn't needed my help.

 

Undeterred, I opted to write a speech that, instead of creating it, maintained his newfound presidential persona. The speech I wrote uses the central themes of Mayor Buttigieg’s campaign — freedom, democracy, and security — to broach a discussion of intergenerational justice, another defining feature of the Mayor’s campaign. I attempted to emulate his style, and often included passages taken verbatim from his stump and presidential announcement speeches.

 

While the speech is set to be delivered in Detroit, I filmed my delivery of it in Ann Arbor, on the steps of Hatcher Graduate Library.