Hendrik Hertzberg Quotes
The speechwriter’s very existence is an affront to the politician, because it intimates that the politician is too lazy or stupid to decide what it is he is going to say…. By giving the politician something to say the speechwriter suggests by implication that the politician has nothing to say. So a politician is generally a little resentful toward and ashamed of his speechwriter—not ashamed of the particular person holding the job, simply of the fact that the job exists.
Hendrik Hertzberg, Presidential Speech Writer, Political Columnist, “A Moral Ideologue,” Treatment for a PBS program: Character Above All, May 31, 1995
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Description of Mary Elizabeth Lease, 1853-1933
Agrarian Reformer and Populist
Reagan, Ford, Bush, Clinton
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Ryan told the national audience that President Obama had come to a factory in his district that as rumored to be closed. Obama had told the workers that the Federal government could assist and keep the factory open for many years. Then as Ryan explained, the factory closed the following year. He gave this as an example of Obama not keeping his word. However what Ryan did not say was that Obama had made the speech at the factory when he was a candidate for the Presidency, and then the factory was closed while George W. Bush was President and by the time he took office, the closure was done and the factory machines gone. And when Obama took office, our national economy was within days of complete bank and finance collapse. Obama saved most of the banks and then the American automobile industry. To suggest that Obama could have or should have done something for the factory that closed was shockingly misleading. It would have been a minor issue if some party hack had lied and made the same accusation. But this was the Vice Presidential Candidate whose acceptance speech was assumedly vetted by the Presidential Candidate’s staff. That is why the quotation was so memorable.
He was one of the great orators of Ancient Rome. See {240929} for another of his quotes about speechmaking. Both recommend focus and brevity.
Everett, considered a great orator, spoke at Gettysburg before Lincoln, but he went on for 2 hours. Hardly anyone recalls his speech. His complement was contemporary praise indeed and right on in the view of Americans of future generations.
He was a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson who wrote many of his own speeches but so many are required a modern president and candidate must have speechwriters.
George W. Bush was very bright, but ineloquent to the distress of many of his supporters who found it embarrassing for the leader of the Free World to be so ineloquent.
Hendrik Hertzberg (born 1943) is an American journalist, best known as the principal political commentator for The New Yorker magazine. He has also been a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and editor of The New Republic, and is the author of ¡Obámanos! The Rise of a New Political Era and Politics: Observations & Arguments. In 2009, Forbes named Hertzberg one of the "25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media," placing him at number seventeen.
