David Litt entered the White House in 2011 and left in 2016 as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter. Described as the “comic muse for the president,” Litt began contributing jokes to President Obama’s speeches in 2009 and was the lead writer on four White House Correspondents’ Dinners. He is currently the head writer/producer for Funny Or Die’s office in Washington, D.C.Litt's new book is Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years.
From the transcript of his interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross:
GROSS: So when you're writing speeches for President Obama or writing jokes for him, it's not just a question of how the president is going to react, it's also a question of how the world is going to react and how the press is going to react. So I'd like to ask you to give an example of something pretty minor, really, but that ended up getting criticized. And this was - I think it was your, like, your very first speech that you wrote for the president. It was a Thanksgiving Day speech. So tell us the story of that. And by the way, did you have to pardon a turkey in this speech? Is it one of those?--Marshal Zeringue
LITT: No. I, somewhat shockingly, managed to never do the turkey pardon. And I don't know how I managed to avoid that one. No, the turkey-pardon speech was always - that was sort of the most pun-laden speech of the year because there's all these Thanksgiving puns. So in some ways, it was fun. And in some ways - every way - it was sort of, by definition, it was sort of the - a festival of dad jokes.
But this was 2011. I was writing the Thanksgiving video address, which is not the most important presidential speech, not by a long shot. But it was my first video that I'd ever written for President Obama. And I treated this thing tremendously seriously. And I thought I had done it. I thought I had done the perfect job of capturing the spirit of Thanksgiving for America. And the problem was that I left out the word God or the Almighty.
And I will say, in my defense, at one point during the video, President Obama talked about giving thanks for blessings. So it's not like he was - you know, these blessings were coming from somewhere. It's not like we hadn't mentioned the idea of the Almighty at all. But this was enough for Fox News to jump on it and start a controversy. And by the time dessert was served, I was with my family, and I remember, you know, everyone was excited for me when we started the meal. And then by the end, it was clear this was going to be a story because Fox ran a Obama-leaves-God-out-of-Thanksgiving-address story.
The conservative media began to pick it up. And then the mainstream press - I use ABC News as an example - they didn't cover the omission of the Almighty in the speech because I think they would've agreed that was not a big deal, but they did cover the controversy. So they ran a separate story about the fact that Fox News had run a story and that conservatives were riled up about this issue. And so you watched as this thing, which wasn't really a story at all, but it was a very small omission - it gradually seeped into the news cycle. And I say that not because I am avoiding responsibility for it.
One of the things I learned as a White House speechwriter is that your job as a speechwriter is not to just write good speeches. Your job is to keep in the back of your mind the fact that there's a whole industry of people trying to take your words out of context. And that's politics. And so you need to write something that - where you read through it and you say, A, are we saying what we want to say? And B, can this, under no circumstances, be misconstrued to say something different? And those kind of dual responsibilities are one of the reasons writing for a president is so difficult.
GROSS: Isn't Thanksgiving a secular holiday?
LITT: (Laughter) Not according to Fox News, it's not. It is true that George W. Bush left God and the Almighty out of...[read on]