I was confident in the speech I’d written, but couldn’t bear to watch it delivered. Any extended silence would make me think the audience didn’t like it. Any wind-up to an important point would feel too long. Over the next eight years, I almost never saw a speech that I wrote being delivered to a crowd; instead, I would choose the detached experience of pacing backstage, occasionally glancing at my BlackBerry and reading the initial reactions to the speech as it was being given.
