(Libertine Magazine, 3 March 2009)
So by now we all know Barack Obama’s the new black (a motif which works on so many different levels). We are, as the generation that by proxy elected him to office, part of a great movement which those who lean left in the wind see as a great rebirth for the world and those who lean right see as some sort of nuevo-Hitler Youth. The problem is that Barack Obama is so very 2008; and especially now that he’s been celebrated by pretty much everyone – including old people: how bad is that? – he needs to be put out to pasture.
The King is dead: long live the new King! And you don’t have to go too far away from the West Wing to find him.
His name is Jon Favreau, and he’s the main reason you loved Barack Obama.
Obama himself is a pretty good writer – you only have to read his books (which weren’t, like so many autobiographies, ghost written) to recognise that – but he ceded power over what he said in his campaign to become President of the United States to a now-27-year old whose first words to him were “you have to change what you’ve written.”
Favreau was then 23, and working as John Kerry’s (if you imagine Sam the Eagle from The Muppets, you have a picture of him in your mind) deputy speechwriter. Obama, then the junior member of the Democratic Party at their 2004 convention, was going to use a line Kerry wanted for his own; Favreau was sent to pull rank on Obama.
John Kerry won the nomination to run for President in 2004, but lost the election. Favreau jumped onto a winning team, and became the coolest guy you’ve probably never heard of.
“Yes We Can!” Yeah, that would be Jon Favreau. Or Favs, because he’s 27, wears jeans and plays Guitar Hero to wind down his caffeine highs after a full night with a bunch of Red Bulls. When you’re that cool, you only use a nickname.
When you’re that cool, you also don’t believe in offices. Favs, because he’s essentially just a student or a big kid who happens to control the tongue of the most powerful man on earth, prefers to buy one cup of coffee at Starbucks and sit there a full day, nursing his cup like it’s his own progeny.
Yeah, that’s right: when tasked with writing a speech for Barack Obama to give at his inauguration – not a big deal, just a couple of million people crammed into Washington’s Mall and billions watching on television – Jon Favreau took himself to a Starbucks with a laptop and set himself going on writing the most scrutinised inaugural speech in history. It turned out pretty alright, too.
Favreau conjured up sheer eloquence – “for us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and travelled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and ploughed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died” – in the most boring place on earth; a cookie-cutter coffee shop, where the only interesting or inspiring thing is to imagine sticking it to ‘the man’ by stealing one of their mugs and cherishing it as a keepsake. If someone had done that in Britain, we’d have had a surly, dull speech which might not even have made it to the podium because the laptop would’ve been lost or stolen. It not only takes talent to write the most important speech of a generation in a Starbucks, it takes chutzpah that the woman with the skinny double-macchiato isn’t peering over your shoulder and tattling to the papers.
But this is no ordinary person, working for no ordinary man. The weird thing is that Jon Favreau has eclipsed Barack Obama in being cool, and in representing a generation. In the iconoclastic following that Obama has enjoyed, precious few people know his stance on immigration, the economy or healthcare. All they know is that he speaks real pretty; all they know is his words – and his words are Jon Favreau’s.
That’s not strictly true: Favreau’s speeches have their basis in Barack Obama’s words. The now-President, then-campaigner, would sit down with Favreau to discuss general aims for each speech he would make. Jon Favreau would sit there at his iBook, tapping out a few notes while Obama held court.
It was after these meetings, then, that Favs would wander off to a quiet corner – or a Starbucks, if it was, you know, a really important speech – and write up the words that are shaping how exactly the world is moving.
It’s an incredible power, if you think about it. The President of the United States is rightly given the subtitle of Leader of the Free World: America has led us across the world (and into orbit), all because of one man’s will. Kennedy decided that his country needed to be the first to leave a footprint on the Moon’s surface. He declared this through his speechwriter, on a brisk Texan September day in 1962. “We,” he said to his audience at Rice University, “set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”
The reason why people didn’t laugh at John F. Kennedy when he stood behind a podium and said that he wanted to not only propel man through the Earth’s atmosphere attached to an incredible tonnage of highly flammable fuel, but to then direct man towards a mass of – well, here’s the thing…in 1962 people didn’t know what the Moon was made of. Some thought it was solid, some thought it was like quicksand, and that the Apollo lunar module would land on the surface then fall through. Some thought that a giant space snake would be hiding under the surface and snaffle it up whole, like eating a Toblerone without taking off the foil – a mass of stuff, then land people there, then take off again, was because he said it nicely.
It’s a commonplace law of life that if you say things prettily, you can get away with anything. It’s happened since the first pickpocket said “weren’t me, guv” to some prehistoric caveman court. Because John F. Kennedy predicated the truth of the matter (that a Moon landing was “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked”) with a pretty story about how a British explorer called George Mallory – who, fun fact for you, died while climbing Mount Everest – said that he was going to try and surmount the peak “because it is there”, people ate it up.
A whole nation stayed awake on July 20, 1969 to see Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the Moon; 500 million people stayed awake and held parties, waving Old Glory, because they had been taken in by the romance of the Moon. Without Ted Sorensen – who wrote about the Moon’s mystique for John Kennedy – all that wouldn’t have happened.
So the future of the world is held not in the left hand of Barack Obama, but rather in the keyboarding fingertips of the 27-year old guy lingering behind Barack Obama wearing an open-collared shirt and jeans. No wonder Jon Favreau has women falling at his feet.
Take a look at any of the many Facebook groups (well, what else did you expect?) dedicated to the man and you’ll see a tranche of women throwing their pixellated selves before him, hurling out compliments and offers of marriage into the vast ether.
Jon Favreau is, however, just a normal guy, who happens to hold one of the most powerful underground jobs in the world. When Barack Obama became President in November, Favs sent an email to a friend which was startling in its ineloquence. Under the subject ‘Dude,’ he wrote ‘We won. Oh my God.’
Jon Favreau is a mind reader. Barack Obama said it, and he must know – it’s his mind that Favs is reading.
A copy of ‘Dreams From My Father’, Barack Obama’s first book, followed Jon Favreau around on every stop of the campaign trail; submerging himself into the life of the Obamas has allowed Favreau to become the President when needed, channelling his unique prose style and crafting his speeches to fit Obama’s unique oratorical style.
So it is, then, that while Barack Obama becomes a familiar face on the world stage, we look to the more unrecognisable face doing extraordinary things. We look beyond the President, and to the President’s men. And Jon Favreau is perhaps the most interesting, the most influential, and the most intriguing of those unseen masses.
Jon Favreau wrote his college’s valedictory speech, a traditional piece of corny Americana, where one person tries to rally his fellow students to march on into the future with a beaming smile and clean nails. They can often be cringe-inducing, shoddy pieces of self-appreciation. But when you’re as cool as Jon Favreau, you don’t fall into that trap. You shrug your shoulders, and deliver a speech of extraordinary eloquence which admits that “no-one’s asking us to save the world – only to save whatever piece of it we can. […] Will not these tasks constitute bold undertakings? Indeed, I’m sure they will. But I have faith that we will try them, and, God willing, we shall succeed.” It’s the Jon Favreau way.
The end of summer can mean only one thing: thousands of students about to go away for two months, or four, or twelve to far-flung places and meet brilliant new people, experience new things and come back with a skin complexion three shades darker than it used to be and a billion stories to non-gappers when they get to university.
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