page_title: 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address
section_title: Writing
hierarchical_section_title: 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address / Writing
caption_attribution_description: فارسی: تابلوی امید اثر «جرج فردریک واتس» متعلق به ۱۸۸۶ است، در این تابلو امید در قالب زنی مجسم شده که چنگی با تنها یک رشتهٔ سالم در دست دارد. او سرش را نزدیک به آلت موسیقی گرفته است، تا بتواند نوای ضعیف موسیقی برخاسته از تک‌تار سالم را بشنود.
context_page_description: The keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was given by then Illinois State Senator, United States senatorial candidate, and future President Barack Obama on the night of Tuesday, July 27, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts. His unexpected landslide victory in the March 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate Democratic primary made him a rising star within the national Democratic Party overnight, and led to the reissue of his memoir, Dreams from My Father. His keynote address was well received, which further elevated his status within the Democratic Party and led to his reissued memoir becoming a bestseller.
  Obama first met Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in the spring of 2004, and was one of several names considered for the role of keynote speaker at the party's convention that summer. Obama was told in early July 2004 that he was chosen to deliver the address, and he largely wrote the speech himself, with later edits from the Kerry presidential campaign. Delivered on the second night of the DNC in just under 20 minutes, the address included both a biographical sketch of Obama, his own vision of America, and the reasons for his support of Kerry for the presidency.
context_section_description: Obama began drafting his speech while staying in a hotel in Springfield, Illinois, several days after learning he would deliver the address.  According to his account of that day in The Audacity of Hope, Obama states that he began by considering his own campaign themes and those specific issues he wished to address, and while pondering the various people he had met and stories he had heard during his campaign, was reminded of the phrase "The audacity of hope", which was previously used in a sermon by his pastor Jeremiah Wright. The title of Wright's sermon was "The Audacity to Hope" but Obama recalled it as "The Audacity of Hope", which became the title for his conference address, and later the title of his second book. This seemingly minor change turned Wright's verb into Obama's noun.
  Wright had attended a lecture by Dr Frederick G. Sampson in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1980s, on the George Frederic Watts painting Hope, which inspired him to give a sermon in 1990 based on the subject of the painting - "with her clothes in rags, her body scarred and bruised and bleeding, her harp all but destroyed and with only one string left, she had the audacity to make music and praise God ... To take the one string you have left and to have the audacity to hope ...  that's the real word God will have us hear from this passage and from Watt's painting."
  The first draft was written longhand, and Obama reportedly labored over it for some two weeks, often beyond midnight.  Described by his campaign political director as "a greatest hits collection of rhetoric drawn from his stump speeches", Obama also watched and read previous keynote addresses during the process.  Originally given 8 minutes to speak, Obama's completed address ran 25 minutes, leading to two more weeks of edits with advisors that brought it down to 17 minutes.  The final draft was sent to a Democratic speechwriting team at the FleetCenter on roughly July 20, at which time some biographical material was removed so as to include more on the presidential ticket; one report indicated that roughly three quarters was reported to have been left intact after the Kerry campaign's edits, while another indicated that very little had been changed.  After delivering it, Obama acknowledged that his and Kerry's staffs had reviewed the speech for length, noting, however, that he was proud to have written it himself along with most of his other speeches.
caption: Hope
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