Cody Keenan: The Lucky Break
by Ben Branham on February 12, 2008 in Features
It always helps to be a great writer. Especially if you’re trying to get an internship with Barack Obama’s speechwriting office. It also helps to have worked for a guy named Kennedy.
Cody Keenan (MPP2) had both qualifications on his side. The thing is, he wasn’t exactly looking to work on the campaign.
“I was looking at policy jobs in the City of Chicago and for [Maryland Governor] Martin O’Malley,” Keenan said. “I hadn’t even thought of the Obama campaign.”
Then one day last spring, over beers with Stephanie Cutter, who served as communications director for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid and previously worked with Keenan in the office of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, she suggested he get in touch with Jon Favreau, Obama’s 26-year-old wunderkind speechwriter.
Cutter forwarded his resume, and he figured it would end up in the same pile as thousands of others that were pouring into the campaign. “I didn’t really think anything would come of it,” Keenan said.
When Favreau did in fact give him a call for an initial phone interview, the two discovered unique commonality. In 2005, as Senators Obama and Kennedy spoke at an awards ceremony in the Senate, Favreau and Keenan, who didn’t know one another, watched from the back of the hall. It was one of the first speeches Keenan had written for Kennedy - and one of the first Favreau had written for Obama.
“Barack totally stole the show,” Keenan conceded. “And I told Jon that over the phone. I told him how nervous I was that day watching Kennedy give his speech, and he laughed and said he felt the same way. So we hit it off pretty well.”
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, however, sitting at the outdoor Legal Sea Foods bar next to the Taubman Building, that Keenan received a phone call from the campaign extending him an offer.
And so began a summer sojourn as part of a three-person team that crafted the rhetoric which came to characterize Obama’s signature oratory.
“Over the summer, we were still introducing Barack to crowds who didn’t know who he was,” Keenan recalled. “We’d sit down and toss around ideas to see what stuck. We also used the word ‘dude’ about 100 times a day. I wish all the time that I’d stayed - but it’s probably no coincidence that, as soon as I left, they really began to hit their stride!”
Written by Ben Branham · Filed Under Features
Ben Branham (MPP2) is a former News Editor of the Citizen. Prior to his time at the Harvard Kennedy School, Branham worked as a press secretary in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He spent last summer creating “One Vote Under God” (www.onevoteundergod.org), a web matrix documenting the role of faith and religion in the 2008 presidential campaign as part of the national News21 initiative (newsinitiative.org). He attended college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he majored in English. Other past jobs include waiting tables, mowing lawns, giving tours, and selling pies to raise money for people with HIV/AIDS. Originally from Chicago, Branham now lives in Cambridge, MA with no pets. He's a Scorpio.
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