How Barack Obama Learned to Give a Speech: Read An Excerpt From His Speechwriter's New Book (Excerpt)

Mar. 15, 2025

President Barack Obama talks with Terry Szuplat, Senior Director for Speechwriting, while he waits backstage to deliver remarks on the Iran nuclear agreement at American University in Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2015.Photo:Official White House Photo/Pete Souza

Official White House Photo/Pete Souza

In 1981, students at Occidental College in Los Angeles held a rally against South Africa’s brutal apartheid policy of racial segregation. The first speaker was a 19-year-old sophomore namedBarack Obama. He managed to get out only a few sentences, however, before two students rushed up, pretending to be South African security forces, and dragged him away—a bit of political theater to highlight the oppression of anti-apartheid activists.

“The whole thing was a farce,” he explained years later, and his “one-minute oration” was “the biggest farce of all.” “That’s the last time you will ever hear another speech out of me,” he told a friend. “I’ve got no business speaking for Black folks.”

President Barack Obama talks with Terry Szuplat, Senior Director for Speechwriting, while he waits backstage to deliver remarks on the Iran nuclear agreement at American University in Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2015.Official White House Photo/Pete Souza

“I think the starting point for effective speaking, for me at least, and for most people who I find persuasive,” he said, “is do they have a sense of who they are and what they believe?” At the rally on campus that day, he recalled, “I was a callow youth who was trying to sort out who I was and what I believed.” The rally had given him a chance to raise his voice. But looking back on his younger self, he said, “I wasn’t ready yet.”

After college, Obama worked as a community organizer with churches on Chicago’s South Side. “At that point, I was accustomed to speaking in front of people,” he told me. “I was not naturally inclined to be nervous”— until one day when his swagger proved to be his undoing.

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He was 24 years old, making a fundraising pitch to a conference room full of philanthropists. “I was feeling pretty cocky,” he remembered. “I had not written down my remarks. I felt like I could go into any room and just sort of wing it, which was a bad mistake.”

He started his presentation. “There are a bunch of people in suits,” he recalled. “I’m looking a little raggedy and a little out of place. About four or five minutes into my presentation, I just started freezing up. I lost my train of thought.”

“I was terrible,” he said. “I felt a little bit of flop sweat and hemmed and hawed, and got stuck, and was not particularly coherent.” I asked if he remembered how it had felt.

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“You erase it from your mind,” he joked at first. Then he turned more pensive.

“You feel,” he said, pausing to find the words, “stupid and embarrassed.”

But then he did what any of us can do–he worked to get better.

Obama continued working as a community organizer, often speaking in church basements.

“The best speakers are in a conversation with their audience” — and that includes listening to what’s important to the people you’re communicating with.

“Everybody has a sacred story,” he told me, “one that gets to their essential selves. And listening to other people tell their stories helped me understand my own.”

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“You know who were good coaches for me?” he said. “All those Black pastors I was in church with … Preachers know how to preach. Just listening and hearing and watching, I soaked a lot of that in.” Of all the places where he learned to speak, listening to the pastors of Chicago, he said, “was probably the most valuable.”

A few years later, he had his first big chance to put to use what he had learned. As a 28-year-old law student and president of the Harvard Law Review, he  was asked to speak at the Law Review’s annual dinner and introduce that year’s honoree — the civil rights icon and congressman John Lewis. “He was one of my childhood heroes,” Obama told me. “I wanted to make sure that I did him justice.”

“This was the first time I gave a big public speech in front of a large group of people that I did not know, in a setting that mattered to me, on a subject that I cared about. I took a lot of time to think through what I wanted to say. I wrote out the speech. I memorized the speech. And then I delivered the speech” — brief remarks, perhaps five to seven minutes, to a few hundred people.

“It was the first time I felt like ‘I’ve got the audience, I’m moving them, I’m telling a story that resonates with them,’” he said.

Barack Obama was starting to find his voice. Over the next decade, he worked to refine it, including in the classroom. Even as he served in the Illinois State Senate, he taught classes at the University of Chicago Law School. “It’s where I learned to feel comfortable being in a dialogue with people for long stretches of time.”

That dialogue continued in his early political campaigns. “When I first started running for Congress,” he said, “I had a tendency in some settings, including debates and impromptu remarks, of not telling stories, but rather listing off talking points, factoids and policy … I still needed to learn how to make effective, impromptu speeches to larger groups of strangers in a high-pressure situation.”

Four years later — and with a lot more reps under his belt — he drew on all the lessons he’d learned as he prepared for what would be, to that point, the highest-pressure moment of his life.

At the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, Obama took the stage — smiling, clapping, waving to the crowd — adjusted the mic, and began to speak. I was there, down on the convention floor, watching as he introduced himself to us and millions watching at home.

My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack … While studying [in America], my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas … They would give me an African name, Barack, or “blessed,” believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

“I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage,” he continued. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

At certain moments, he spoke with the rhythm of the preachers he’d heard at the pulpit. He didn’t speakatthose of us in the audience, butwithus — a dialogue, a conversation. Instead of ticking off wonkish talking points and factoids, he told a bigger story — his voice rising as he neared the end of his speech — about who we were as a country, our values, where we came from and where we’re going:

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us … Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

I’d never heard anyone speak like this — someone who so unabashedly saw our diversity as a people not as a weakness to be exploited for political gain, but as a strength to be celebrated and nurtured; someone who didn’t just give voice to that diversity, but who embodied it, calling himself “a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too.”

“There’s no question,” his adviser David Axelrod told me years later, that “Obama couldn’t have given that speech if he hadn’t thought deeply about his own identity over many years. He knew who he was, and he understood how his story shaped him.”

It turns out, Barack Obama wasn’t, as many people thought, a “naturally-gifted speaker.” After freezing up while giving that speech as a young man, he’d done what all of us can do–he put in the work and, over time, got better.

source: people.com