Emerging from a comment on ChurchillEpigrams  --

Your politicians wrote their own speeches?  --PhlIp

''That one did.''

Interesting comment.  Is the decline of a nation inevitable once politicians ''stop'' writing their own speeches?

''Why the attack on professional speech writers? Many people presume that a speech written by a professional is somehow not genuine; is not '' really '' what the deliverer of the speech intended to communicate. I argue that a professionally-written speech can help a speaker communicate their message more effectively. Just as writers have editors, speakers have speech writers. Is editing precipitating the downfall of written language? I argue that speech writers have been in existence for quite a long time, and that they have no bearing on any alleged national decline. This mistrust of speeches should more properly be focused on the elected officials who have merit such mistrust.''
-- RobertChurch

Which is all of them.

Besides, the correct analogue to a professional speechwriter isn't an editor but a ghostwriter.

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As far as the decline of the nation goes, blame . . . 

''Well, that and not inhaling their cannabis, recommending bombing The Soviet Union, getting fellated under the desk by a subordinate while on the phone, killing thousands of Panamanians to recall a CIA asset, killing tens of thousands of Iraquis trying to recall a CIA asset, or getting assasinated by the shadow government... --PhlIp''

The decline of Athens, though, can in a large part be attributed to the professionalization of their society.  Speech writers helped by making rhetoric, the most valuable commodity in democracy, available to the unskilled wealthy. -- Anon remarked in 2001
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Funnily enough, I'd been thinking quite a lot about that over the weekend.  About how TheFew and TheNazis, for example, two phrases Churchill wrote and used to great effect in speeches, went to define the nation at that time and her relation to other nations, including the UnitedStates.  
--RichardDrake

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I've been dwelling on it too.  I was reading the December 27th issue of U.S News and World Report yesterday (I was at the Dr.'s ofice and it was the most recent reading material available) and it discussed how much of the way that Americans view themselves and their country was defined by the speeches given by FranklinDelanoRoosevelt during his presidency.  I think that FDR is the closest U.S. counterpart to Churchill in this realm.  Phrases and ideas like the FourFreedoms and TheOnlyThingWeHaveToFear shaped that generation, and the succeeding generations.  

He also defined our attitudes toward Britain by casting it the SpecialRelationship -- mostly built on his personal attitudes toward Churchill, but which has become firm U.S. Policy for the last sixty-one years.  Think of the way in which the relationships between Reagan and Thatcher, or Clinton and Blair were representative of that policy...

KyleBrown
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CategoryCommunication