Conventions are political carnivals, notable for their chaos, pageantry, and, occasionally, the speeches. In 2004, Barack Obama, then running for the U.S. Senate, made his name with a speech at the DNC in Boston. Other speakers have made less of an impression—and left with their political aspirations forever dimmed.

“It’s kind of this weird mix of pep rally and talent show,” Litt said. “But that matters. ... Everyone thinks of the conventions as less important than ever, but what you can do is combine all these smaller narrative into one bigger, nation-wide narrative. And that can be really special. You can’t do that anyplace else.”

Litt left the White House in January to join the comedy website Funny or Die. I recently spoke with him about political conventions and the people who craft the speeches that define them.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Christopher I. Haugh: Why don’t you start by telling me about how you ended up in Charlotte and what you were up to in the lead up?

David Litt: I was writing speeches for the president out of the Democratic National Committee. Jon Favreau was the chief speechwriter for the president at the time, Cody Keenan was his deputy, and they were writing political speeches in the White House. I was at the DNC as the third person on the campaign side of the president’s speeches, as opposed to the official side.

Haugh: Tell me about speechwriting at the convention. What is it like for a staffer?

Litt: At the conventions you’ve got the candidates, the spouse of the presidential candidate, and you usually have one or two other big names. In this case, Bill Clinton was giving a big speech. Those are the primetime speeches. They are the ones that get the most press. But you also have all these other speeches. I think it was well over 100 people who were speaking from 5 o’clock until 10 o’clock every day. There are five hours a day of speeches, every day, and each speech is only five to seven minutes long. So there’s a whole team of people who are supervising all of those speeches and trying to fit the same message, even though they are not going to be the next day’s news in the way that the president or the vice president’s speech will be.

Most of what you are doing at the convention is you are taking somebody’s words and editing them and moving them around. You are not starting from scratch, except in rare cases, because you are really trying to make sure they sound as much like themselves as possible. But you also want the message to be unified.

Haugh: How do you make sure everyone is hewing to that unified message?

Litt: One of the things that the 2012 campaign really thought carefully about was making sure everyone was on the same page going in. They met with people who were at the highest level of the president’s messaging operation to say, ‘This is where we see this race going; here’s the contrast we need to draw; and, no matter what someone is talking about, we want it to come back to this central argument,’ which, in 2012, was: Are we moving forward or are we moving back? And, also, do we grow the economy from the top down or the middle out? That became our north star. I’m not sure it always works out as well as everyone hopes it will. In 2012, I think it really did work.