It's often the US president's most important address of the year - but for speechwriters it's the assignment from hell.
As US President Joe Biden puts the finishing touches to his State of the Union address, spare a thought for the behind-the-scenes toil of the White House speechwriters, the hardest-working team in Washington this time of year.
"It's the biggest speech you'll write all year, but it's also the most frustrating and annoying and time consuming," he says.President Biden's first State of the Union last March came only five days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. His second, on Tuesday, will be before a new Congress in which Republicans control one chamber.
His office had a coffee maker, gifted to him by National Security Council aides keen to get an item added to the speech one year. "The real chief speechwriter was always Barack Obama, whether it was the State of the Union or any other big speech," says Terry Szuplat, who helped craft nearly 500 Obama speeches between 2009-17.
"There's so many items to be addressed that every speechwriter does their best to pull it together in a coherent narrative with a common theme that brings everything together, but it's just so difficult when you're talking about truly everything - a state of the union," the rhetorical handyman says.Ahead of the speech, Mr Obama would sit down with his lead writers and establish an overarching theme for the address.
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