The Man Behind Obama’s Words

A friend of mine in the teaching profession is going through the process with a passionate curiosity of intimately familiarizing herself with the techniques that she should utilize as a future emotional coach, a profession currently all the rage, among other things. These methods would help us to be more socially competent, in charge of our emotions and conscious of our body language and the power of speech. As politicians, businessmen, athletes, union members, professors, artists and journalists we should all have our own emotional coach, just as we turn to other professionals for preventive or other necessary measures. I don’t know if the soon-to-be President of the United States of America has or had the support of an emotional coach during the long and hard electoral campaign. I suspect that he did because Americans do not tend to improvise nor practice spontaneity without having prepared, analyzed and rehearsed it a thousand times.

What I am sure of, because we learned about it through the media, is that he has had a spiritual editor by his side: the man that knew how to capture the feelings, ideas and proposals that have motivated and inspired hope in the majority of American citizens. If it is important to write a good speech then it is even more essential to know how to read one. It’s the power of speech. The 27-year-old ghostwriter, Jon Favreau, has led Obama’s speechwriting team, and both the “New York Times” and “Newsweek” have dedicated interviews and long articles about him. Someone went as far as to call him “the poet” for his lyrical contributions to Obama’s phrases. Anyone who has experienced firsthand the chance to be the ghostwriter for someone else understands the happiness and personal satisfaction that the young ‘Favs’ -that is his nickname among the Democratic team-must feel knowing that he played a necessary role in such an exceptional historic moment like that of an African-American becoming the next head tenant in the White House.

Through Jon’s pen and Obama’s elocution , the literary dream of the Dominican writer Manuel del Cabral has come true. His novel, “The Black President,” published in 1973 in his later years, predicted the future from the color of his skin and suffering of his people. In his work, Del Cabral calls out to people of all ideologies, independent of their race, religion, geographical space and historical past, to come together under the common idea of sharing their existence as well as to seek with humility and respect the creation of a more just and harmonious society through dialogue and reason.