North Reading’s Jon Favreau stepping down as White House speechwriter

President Obama’s reelection will keep him in the White House for another four years. But it won’t keep Jon Favreau there. The North Reading native who’s been writing speeches for Obama for seven years, is leaving the position March 1 to tackle another kind of storytelling: screenwriting. A graduate of College of the Holy Cross, Favreau was working as a speechwriter for John Kerry when he met Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Just 23 at the time, Favreau had been dispatched by Kerry, the senator about to become the presidential nominee, to tell Obama, then a senate candidate from Illinois, to remove a particular sentence from the speech he was to give at the DNC. (Kerry planned to deliver essentially the same line.) Obama was impressed and hired Favreau soon after. In a statement this week to the Washington Post, Obama made it clear he’ll miss more than Favreau’s rhetorical flourishes. “He has become a friend and a collaborator on virtually every major speech I’ve given in the Senate, on the campaign trail, and in the White House.”