Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes is penning a different script for the world stage

His mannerisms also became familiar. The way he whispered to emphasize emotion, usually somewhere around the word "we." The way he hunched over the microphone and extended a straight right arm, like some sort of applause-o-meter, to communicate passion. The imperious way he peered over teleprompters at the crowd. His tendency toward verbosity.

"Some of those sentences get a little long and complicated," said Ted Sorensen, chief speechwriter and a policy adviser to John F. Kennedy.

Sorensen is a staunch supporter of Obama, and even helped install his own protege, Adam Frankel, on the Favreau team. But he has said the president has appeared stuck in campaign mode for much of his first year in office and was in need of, as he put it, more "clarity and directness."

When it came to Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan -- a policy Sorensen said he prayed against -- he said the president required "a combination of very specific facts and plans with the kind of inspiration and appeal that has worked for him in the past" to convince the skeptical nation.

Obama assigned the speech to Rhodes.

"He and Ben are in the same place about how to conduct a foreign policy," Gibbs said of the president. "That makes Ben able to explain a theory of the case that the president wants the American people to understand."

"He explicitly did not want to be chest-pounding or to be unmoored from a serious set of policy choices he had made," said Rhodes, who presented several drafts of the speech to the president over the course of a week.

Obama delivered his Afghanistan speech in front of the West Point cadets whom he was deploying into combat, and it sounded different. "The least rousing, most skeptical call to arms I've ever heard," George Packer, the veteran war correspondent for the New Yorker, wrote, not unhappily, of the speech. The purposely flat, sober and explanatory sections are those most likely to be remembered.

"There is a language of governing that is different from campaigning and different from spinning," said Michael Waldman, President Bill Clinton's director of speechwriting, who called the Afghanistan speech a profoundly serious document. " . . . He announced he was sending troops. People don't want that done with applause lines."

In the speech, Rhodes helped Obama carefully articulate his decision in language mindful of audiences both domestic and international. Afghanistan wasn't a quagmire, the president argued, because the Taliban wasn't a "broad-based popular insurgency." Staying at the current troop levels would be ineffective; staying indefinitely "sets goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost."

The speech was not entirely without the vestiges of Obama's campaign oratory, and the final passages about "the strength of our values" sounded ancillary, compared with the tight argument of the 33-minute address.

But Rhodes insisted that the "values" coda of the West Point speech "very much leads into the Oslo speech," making clear that America is bearing much of the international burden in Afghanistan. "It was a starting point," Rhodes said.

The day after the address in West Point, Rhodes and Favreau met in the Oval Office to start the Nobel speech. As with the Philadelphia speech on race and the inaugural address, Obama wrote much of the remarks himself, this time on a yellow legal pad. Obama and his speechwriters saw the awkwardness in the president receiving the peace prize as he waged two wars, and together they saw an opportunity to describe the messiness of the world and indicate that progress would be painstaking and incremental. It was a speech devoid of rousing chants and memorable turns of phrase. It was a well-structured argument, arguably better when read than heard, of a man whose words now bear the weight of governing.

"Campaign speech is all part of one narrative, but now you are making a series of arguments," said Rhodes, who gamely deconstructed his boss's texts as if he were back in the writing workshop. "An argument is a lot clearer to a listener if there is a structure that they can follow. Structure is what allows you to build a case."

In a recent White House video, filmed against the whir of Air Force One as it flew from Singapore to China, Rhodes tells the camera, "I was just working on the president's remarks on the flight right now." He doesn't look tired.