Yes, I think Barack does a lot of his own wordsmithing -- he seems to be an excellent writer. It's somewhat rare that a modern politician speaks in his or her own right, and quite refreshing. I got a kick out of the talking head responses to Sarah P.'s speechifying at the GOP Convention -- they conveniently ignored that obvious fact that she most likely didn't write or even suggest a word of the whole address. It would be great if we all started insisting such things matter. The issue here is AUTHENTICITY. If you can't even speak in your own voice, your own "right," as the phrase goes, what are you doing up there on a podium addressing millions? To be sure, Lincoln kicked his Gettysburg Address around with Ward Hill Lamon (his friend and bodyguard) and probably a few others, but does anybody really doubt that what people heard in that speech was "Honest Abe" and not a team of speechwriters?

Did Kennedy write his own stuff? I'm pretty sure Roosevelt did. Sounds like an interesting trend. Authorship=Authenticity=Success

JFK had Ted Sorenson as a key speechwriter, which worked well for him. But I think he also was quite capable of doing his own writing -- the press conferences and one-on-one interviews he gave were excellent: he had a witty, incisive way of responding to questions. Definitely a man with a very strong intellect and great facility with words.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with having speechwriters so long as they don't replace the speaker's thoughts with their own. I mean, it's great to have a few excellent, well-read helpers around who can point out that adapting a phrase from John Winthrop or Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather would be just the thing to connect your ideas to a long tradition of American rhetoric. But more and more, speechwriters seem to be used in the spirit that Adam Smith predicted we would someday adopt for many kinds of thinking: he said that as the division of labor became more pronounced with capitalist development, we would begin paying people to do our thinking for us much as we already paid them to cobble our shoes (or something along those lines -- I'm paraphrasing loosely). Enter the modern political speechwriter. Some of the politicians they render almost eloquent couldn't put two coherent sentences together if their lives depended on it.

It's astonishing how bad even very smart people can be with words, so I suppose speaking and writing well really are specialized skills: I once heard diplomats and analysts of great distinction sitting around an interview table talking about how "the Middle East road map to peace was dead in the water." The blokes from Monty Python couldn't dream up anything more ridiculous if you gave them all day!