When Jon Favreau (no, not the actor) left the White House last year, 33-year-old (high-school football-playing, pirate-costume-wearing, Harvard grad and Ted Kennedy intern) Cody Keenan took over the reins of chief spechwriter for President Obama. As Reuters reports [6], Keenan's speechwriting career took off after he crafted the impassioned speech that Obama delivered at a memorial service for victims of a 2011 shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, where former Representative Gabrielle Giffords was seriously injured. A former professor noted "he doesn't take himself too serious," and we suspect, given last night's SOTU, the rest of the world now knows that.
The wordsmithing wizard of terrific teleprompterism dressed for work...
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and his special speechwriting outfit...
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Six days before the State of the Union address, Cody Keenan posted on the photo-sharing site Instagram a blurred image of a speech draft with President Barack Obama's notes in the margins. He ended the post with "#SpoilerAlert #InsideSOTU-Cody."
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No amount of eye-squinting could decipher the details, but if anyone knew exactly what Obama intended to say in his annual address to the nation, it was chief speech writer Keenan.
The 33-year-old Keenan wrote what will be his State of the Union address numero deux after taking over duties last year from Jon Favreau, who left after five years in the job.