自考专本|专升本|高升专|高升本|在职研究生-学历教育网

When he is done, she murmurs, “Where did you learn that?”

He smiles. “From great professors,” he says. (Obama read all of Shakespeare’s tragedies during a short span of time in college and reread several while in Springfield.)

Two years later, she invites him to another of the theater’s productions, The Merry Wives of Windsor. But its premiere is September 2004, and Barack Obama can’t make it because he’s much in demand after having recently delivered the keynote address to the Democratic convention—the largest audience of his life. By then a book editor named Rachel Klayman has discovered that the rights to the long-forgotten memoir from which Obama’s speech was partially cribbed belong to her publishing house, Crown Books, an imprint of Random House. Moving with a swiftness almost unheard of in the annals of publishing, Crown crashes a print run of 50,000 paperback copies. And one month and two days after the keynote address, Dreams from My Father enters the New York Times best-seller list.

Nine years after his book’s publication, the lanky author is an overnight sensation. Dreams has become a rising national politician’s origin story. A few critics take exception to its composite characters, the arbitrary manner in which some but not all names were changed, the actual events compressed and rearranged for the sake of drama, and the elegant “remembered” dialogues from long ago that nonetheless go on for pages and pages. But for the most part, Obama is given a free pass. He has a greater truth to tell. And in this manner, the artistic gall of the writer and the artful calculation of the politician are indistinguishable—as Barack Obama, who by now thoroughly inhabits both worlds, proves better than anyone else.

*****

“what story are we trying to tell?”

Obama invariably asks this question when huddled with his adviser David Axelrod and speechwriters Jon Favreau, Adam Frankel, Ben Rhodes, and Sarah Hurwitz. Speeches, he believes, too often become vehicles for slogans and applause lines. He sticks to his story, and that determination, rather than trying to shift with the news cycle, was a large part of what propelled him to victory last fall.

The world has changed since the days when Thomas Jefferson wrote all of his speeches and memos by hand. FDR brought in celebrity writers from the outside, like Pulitzer-winning author Archibald MacLeish and playwright Robert Sherwood, and since that time Sorensen, William Safire, Peggy Noonan, and Michael Gerson have achieved renown for their backstage penmanship. Still, if Barack Obama’s speeches are judged by history to be memorable, it will be because of the words and thoughts that were supplied by him. When Favreau first read Dreams from My Father, “I was like, I can’t believe this guy is a politician—honestly, I felt like I was reading The Color Purple,” he says. The memoir, bridging the deeply personal with historical antecedents and universal sentiments of struggle and longing, is “the Rosetta Stone of him,” says Rhodes. “In a sense, Audacity is the policy template and Dreams is the character template. And together that’s all you need as a speechwriter.”

Favreau began looting Dreams the moment Senator Obama hired him, in 2005, incorporating elements of it into commencement addresses and later the presidential campaign. Seemingly, every major Obama speech references his memoir: the African father and the Kansas mother and the grandparents serving during World War II; his early struggles as a community organizer (“One of the greatest things I’ve learned from him is that there’s no weakness in talking about failure,” says Favreau); and his travels through Indonesia and Kenya, which find their way into his foreign-policy addresses.

But the template only goes so far. When the subject isn’t policy but Obama’s personal values, says Frankel, “you just wouldn’t presume to write something for him. He has thoughts nobody can characterize.”

This was especially true last March 13, when the incendiary sermons of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blew up all over the cable networks. On that Thursday, Obama had spent the entire day and evening in the Senate. That Friday, after enduring a series of tough interviews, Obama informed Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe, “I want to do a speech on race.” And he added, “I want to make this speech no later than next Tuesday. I don’t think it can wait.” Axelrod and Plouffe tried to talk him into delaying it: He had a full day of campaigning on Saturday, a film shoot on Sunday, and then another hectic day campaigning in Pennsylvania on Monday. Obama was insistent. On the Saturday-morning campaign conference call, Favreau was told to get to work on a draft immediately. Favreau replied, “I’m not writing this until I talk to him.”

1505847972	1256358232	1363884583	1902839745	800072298	754854002
中专升大专	中专升本科	高升专	高升本	专升本	自考