SPEAKER Former Speech Writer Compares Clinton, Bush Oratory Styles By Maya Noronha Special to The Hoya

Charles Nailen/The Hoya Former Director of Speechwriting for President Clinton (SFS ’68) David Kusnet discusses the role of a speechwriter on Wednesday.

Former Director of Speechwriting for President Clinton (SFS ’68) David Kusnet, spoke to students about Clinton’s oratory skills and the influence Georgetown had on the content of his speeches on Wednesday. Kusnet analyzed the role of presidential speechwriting and contrasted Clinton’s speeches with President Bush’s, who delivered his first State of the Union address Tuesday.

“When the State of the Union comes along, I have a lingering feeling in my life that I ought to be working late into the night and into the morning on a speech of some kind,” Kusnet joked. Although Kusnet was working on a speech, this time it was to be delivered by himself to an audience of approximately 50 Georgetown students in White-Gravenor.

The role of the speechwriter, according to Kusnet, is to “try to draft speeches that presidents would have written themselves.” He added that Bush and Clinton have markedly different voices. In Bush’s State of the Union Address and previous speeches he “presents himself as Bill Clinton’s opposite,” Kusnet said.

According to Kusnet, Clinton’s rhetoric is composed of many complex sentences while Bush “wants to present himself as a good man and a plain spoken man.”

Kusnet explained that “for all its seeming simplicity, his Joint Session speech offered a compelling explanation of why and how a decent people in a democratic society can go to war, reluctantly, but resolutely under extreme provocation.”

In Bush’s 48-minute address, the president enumerated his goals for his second year in office – fighting economic recession and overcoming external terrorist threats.

Kusnet spoke in the same White Gravenor classroom where Clinton took a course with his mentor, the late Georgetown History and Sociology Professor Carroll Quigley. “Bill Clinton always used to quote Carroll Quigley in his speeches,” Kusnet said.

For Clinton’s first inaugural address, Kusnet quoted former University President, Timothy Healy, S.J. He used a metaphor of Healy’s as the theme for the first two years of the Clinton administration. The metaphor -“forcing the spring”- was contained in a memo addressed to the president-elect. The memo was found in Healy’s pocket after he died from a heart attack.

Of Clinton, Kusnet said, “While he would later go to Yale and Oxford and later back home to Arkansas, Georgetown was always very much a part of his world.”

Clinton’s talent for extemporaneous speaking influenced the work of his speechwriters, according to Kusnet. “All we really did was just take notes on what Clinton was saying and just type it up and give it back to him and then he’d change it again.”

Kusnet traced Clinton’s love for speeches back to his days at Georgetown, adding that it was “what he loved . the opportunity for a good argument.”

According to Kusnet, Clinton’s affinity for arguing was evident when he ran for positions in student government at Georgetown. “Clinton’s opponent warned that if he won, he would send the student body on `a slippery slope to perdition,'” Kusnet said.

“That candidate was probably the first in a long line of opponents who said pretty much the same thing about Clinton,” Kusnet added.

Kusnet has also written speeches for Democratic Party presidential nominees Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale and presently holds a fellowship at the Economic Policy Institute.

Kusnet’s speech, entitled “Presidential Speeches: Writing Behind the Scenes, Reading Between the Lines” was sponsored by the Lecture Fund.