Campaign trail

From Franklin D.Roosevelt's legendary 1932 statement that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" to J.F. Kennedy's landmark "Ich bin ein Berliner" pledge in 1963, some speeches enter the public consciousness and stay there forever.

Similarly, every now and then a political sound bite seems to capture the zeitgeist so precisely it becomes a household term - such as the "axis of evil" referred to by George W. Bush or President Obama's rousing catchphrase, "Yes we can."

'Politicians are pop stars'

In most cases, these words weren't actually written by the politician who spoke them, but by a speechwriter - part of an increasingly important media team that helps to optimally package a candidate for public consumption.

"Today's politicians are like pop stars, an impression underscored by the media," explains Christoph Schwab.

Schwab's job title is "media coach;" he spends a lot of time putting CDU and FDP politicians through their paces to boost what he calls their "media competency." This includes practicing body language, "choreography," sentence structure and intonation.

Increasingly, giving a speech is as much as about pace, flow and charisma as it is about ideology, Schwab says. In the contemporary political climate, great rhetoric counts for nothing if the delivery is wrong.

"We have training sessions in which I get politicians to act out situations: I step up the pressure, heckle them and attack them - I play the role of their opponent. We record the scene and then watch it together and analyze their performance."

He strongly believes that the importance of a politician's image cannot be overstated.

"Someone's gestures, expressions and appearance claim 93 percent of our attention," he maintains, and insists that the actual content is secondary.

Writers seen as objective voice

"Emotional, expressive and rhetorical elements are what you use to reach your audience, and only then can you introduce your message," he argues.

Ah, the message. A politician might have good ideas, but often, it is up to the speechwriter to find the best way to express them. It is his or her job to help politicians turn their agendas into effective polemic while avoiding problematic controversy.

It isn't clear when speechwriters became indispensable to the political machine. But today, most senior politicians will employ one - not least to serve as the voice of reason.

Andreas Franken is a political speechwriter in Germany. He explains that a politician's aides don't always feel in a position to contradict their boss.

"My advantage is that I'm objective," he says. "We're not members of staff and we don't work for any ministerial department - so we're well-placed to tell the truth."

Some hard truths about candidates

And that is the case even when that truth is a tad uncomfortable.

"I don't like the way Angela Merkel speaks at all," he says. "She still tends to come across as overbearing even though she doesn't need to, because she's actually a humorous person. But she uses too many nouns and her sentences are much too long."

Franken has even less time for her challenger, Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier. "He comes across as very dry and much too bureaucratic," he says.

Franken, like many modern speechwriters, sees himself as writer-for-hire. "I don't find it hard to … write a speech that doesn't necessarily reflect my own political convictions," he says.

Sticking to convictions

That is a change from the old days, says Michael Engelhard, a speechwriter who retired from the business some 20 years ago.

In his day Engelhard, a Social Democrat, crafted speeches for former presidents Walter Scheel and Richard von Weizsaecker, both pro-business Free Democrats, as well as Christian Democrat former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. But he stresses that he would never have been willing to craft an ideological message on behalf of a politician whose ideas he couldn't personally vouch for.

"I'm not prepared to write words I believe are wrong," he said emphatically.

Sometimes, however, the image created for the media seems unconnected from the candidate, and this can be a problem, Engelhard says.

"You get a sense of the reasoning behind Frank-Walter Steinmeier's speeches, but not a sense of conviction," he suggests. "It's hard to grasp what exactly he believes in. What works best is when there is a consistency between the person and their political vision. That's when the public starts to listen."