President Bush's seventh State of the Union speech tonight will be the first time that none of the three men who wrote most of Mr. Bush's speeches for much of his presidency — former chief speechwriter Michael Gerson and his two deputies, Matthew Scully and John McConnell — will have played a major role in crafting the annual address.

Mr. Gerson left the White House in the summer of 2006. But last year, under the direction of Mr. Gerson's replacement, William McGurn, Mr. McConnell and Mr. Scully both worked on the speech.

Mr. McConnell still works at the White House, as Vice President Dick Cheney's head speech writer, and Mr. Scully left in 2004 but was pulled back in on an interim basis last year.

This year, however, sources say that Mr. McGurn has relied chiefly on his two favorite deputies, Marc Thiessen and Christopher Michel.

Mr. McGurn, who joined the White House in 2005, is resigning after tonight's speech and will be replaced by Mr. Thiessen.

CBS News' Mark Knoller has a good inside look today at how the new trio of speechwriters came up with this year's address.

Also, a former Bush speechwriter told me last week that the president has said in the past that he enjoys giving the State of the Union speech almost more than any other annual event, because of the closeness of the audience in the House chamber, and the acoustics.

"I heard him say it's his best venue," the former scribe said. "You don't really appreciate on TV how close everybody is. It feels like a fairly small group, and he's very good at it."