Joe Biden paces as he dictates long portions of his speeches to aides, spinning out thoughts that quickly pile into six, seven or eight paragraphs of copy, only to later be scrapped.
On the 2020 campaign trail, he’d keep groups of supporters waiting inside while he’d hole up in a black car with aides, refining lines of his prepared remarks.
Revisions go up to crunch time; it isn’t uncommon for a staffer to be scurrying to the teleprompter with a flash drive just before an event is to begin.
For higher-profile remarks, he’d obsessively rehearse portions until he committed them to memory. And at times through the various iterations of outlining remarks, Biden could grow downright ornery.
“I would never say this,” Biden once snapped at an aide, aghast over the prepared remarks he was reviewing, according to a person in the room during a speech prep session last year. “Where did you get this from?’”
The aide explained that Biden had just said it in a public speech a couple of weeks earlier.
Such are the hallmarks and unpleasantries that are the sausage-making of speech writing with Biden.
Whether it’s his second stump speech on the same day in Michigan or a nationally televised address, there are few tasks in politics that Biden takes more seriously than speaking. And, perhaps, the struggles he had with speech in his childhood explains why.
Biden’s address, which is supposed to run between 20 and 30 minutes, is expected to reprise themes he’s hit on since he entered the presidential race in April 2019, including bringing back the “soul of the nation,” and a pledge to be president for all Americans, even those who didn’t vote for him.
But unlike some of those past versions, there is heightened urgency to Wednesday’s address. Confronting multiple crises, including a pandemic and the economic fallout from it, Biden needs bipartisan support to push an ambitious agenda through Congress. A powerful inaugural address is seen as one step toward bringing more naysayers to his side, those close to him say.
Longtime aides and advisers expect the inaugural address to traverse territory that Biden has covered over the course of his nearly 50-year public career, while highlighting an agenda that offers up hope to a country ravaged by disease, economic struggles, and violent political insurrection.
While the process behind developing Biden’s speeches can be grueling (one longtime adviser jokingly suggested creating a support group for Biden speech writers), there is a method to it. Biden has maintained a core team of loyal advisers around him who have grown to learn how to parse when the president-elect is just riffing and when he really wants his thoughts committed to paper.
Biden has grown comfortable with chief speech writer Vinay Reddy and senior adviser Mike Donilon, who have helped him thread his narratives in a simple, grounded way. The president-elect has also leaned on Tony Blinken, his secretary of state designate, to help with the speech writing process. Incoming chief of staff Ron Klain is in the mix as well.
For his speeches, Biden receives advice — solicited and unsolicited — from a wide cast of luminaries, which in the past has included historian Jon Meacham. It was not entirely clear among aides if Meacham contributed to the drafting of the inauguration speech, though a source familiar with the process said he had consulted on the process.
