Ghosting Politics: Speechwriters, Speechmakers and the (Re)crafting of Identity

Michael Richardson

doi:10.5130/csr.v23i2.5472

Abstract

Despite public awareness of their role, speechwriters occupy an anxiously liminal position within the political process. As the ongoing dispute between former Australian prime minister Paul Keating and Don Watson over the Redfern Speech suggests, the authorship and ownership of speeches can be a fraught proposition, no matter the professional codes. Crafting and re-crafting identity places speechwriter and speechmaker in a relation of intense intimacy, one in which neither party may be comfortable and from which both may well emerge changed. Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be. This article conceives of identity as transindividual, formed in the intensity and flux of encounter, and weaves together the personal and the critical to examine politics’ speechwriting ghost.

Highlights

Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be
This article conceives of identity as transindividual, formed in the intensity and flux of encounter, and weaves together the personal and the critical to examine politics’ speechwriting ghost
What stoked the intensity of the relationship between Watson and Keating? What kept the fire burning in the long years since? Something bundled up with identity, and visibility, and the sudden appearance of a ghost made flesh, a ghost from within the political machine? Isn’t what matters here a problem of identity, of political performance, and of the strangeness of becoming in public through words mediated by the body of another? Was Keating confronted by the relationality of an identity he had felt to be singular and distinct?

Summary

Introduction

Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be. Isn’t what matters here a problem of identity, of political performance, and of the strangeness of becoming in public through words mediated by the body of another?

Results

Conclusion