[laughter] so i think john favreau has gotten very good at this, and so has his whole team of speech writers. and his process was an interesting one that john told me about, and can john spent a lot of time and several of the speech writers spent be time talking to us, very kind. many, many hours explaining things. so each speech that's in here actually has a very long introduction explaining what was happening, what was going on this pretty l call context, what was happening when they wrote the speech, why they wrote the speech they did, what was going on with the hillary clinton campaign, and i had helped on the hillary clinton campaign. so it was very interesting seeing -- i knew some of the stories from the other side, so it was very interesting seeing the juxtaposition between the two. and can so in this -- when they were this senate which was a practice that continued for a long time, they would john would go sit on his couch in the senate, in the senator's office, and obama would start dictating and say for this speech coming up here's what i think, here's what i think we shoul

>> guest: i no longer cover the obama white house but when did john favreau was instrumental in every significant speech the president gave. and i know from talking to john favreau when i covered the white house and understanding as i learned to during the campaign -- i covered the obama campaign for 14 months the president is extremely involved in big set speeches, not every speech but he edits by hand. because the president, as someone who presents speeches, never really frets about his presentation, he's calm and about the ability to say the words and say them the way he wants to. what he works on and focuses on and what he works on in the last minute is working on it. he knows how to turn a phrase and he takes that part of the speech development process very carefully. >> host: our coverage is today on the state of the union's we'll have live coverage tonight. 8:00 pm eastern time we'll begin with your prespeech coverage taking your comments and your calls and then at 9:00 pm eastern time on c-span and c-span2, we'll be covering the president's address. and then also on c-span, we