Who Wrote the Obama Speech?

There are a couple of conflicting views on who wrote the Obama race speech. From The Corner:

Obama advisers said he wrote the deeply personal speech himself. They said it was delivered in Philadelphia because of the city's historical significance, not because it is the most populous black city in Pennsylvania, site of the next primary vote on April 22.

Mark Hemingway at The Corner is skeptical, as am I, as as far as the writing part goes, so is Joe Carter:

The Greatest Speech on Race (Ever Written By a White Guy?)

Yesterday Senator Barack Obama gave an impassioned and heartfelt speech on race in America. After reading the text online my first reaction was, "Great speech...I wonder who wrote it."

Now if that wasn't your first thought it's probably a sign that you don't live in Washington, D.C.

Wait? You thought Obama wrote it himself? Well, I suppose that's not outside the realm of possibility. And I suspect he did throw in an anecdote and had a hand in adding a line or two. But wrote the whole thing himself? Extremely unlikely.

What is more probable is that the Great Race Speech was written by the "baby faced, 26-year-old white guy" Jon Favreau, the Obama campaign's head speechwriter. (Ironic, isn't it, that such a lauded speech on race was most likely written by a Liberal White Dude?) Favreau has become something of a star because of his ability to put words in Obama's mouth. After the Illinois Senator gave his victory speech in Iowa, Michael Gerson, the conservative former speechwriter for George W. Bush, complimented Favreau on his great work. And rightly so.

Still, there is something unseemly about the practice, even if it is an open secret. In most of America, if you take someone else's words and pass them off as your own it's called plagiarism and it's considered a heinous breach of ethics. In D.C. if you take someone else's words and pass them off as your own it's called ghostwriting and it's considered the way business is done. Everyone in town acknowledges that, unless the person is part of the professional class of scribes, most big-wigs in D.C. aren't writing their own material. Indeed, if you want to stump a politico in Washington, ask them about something they wrote in their latest op-ed. They'll need to have some twenty-something staffer "remind" them of what they supposedly wrote.

I would tend to agree with Joe on this one. I highly doubt that Obama spent too much time on that speech other than practicing it. I have a hard time believing that he wrote the part where he throws his grandmother under the bus and calls her a racist. I think they might have snuck that section into the teleprompter when he wasn't looking.