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He may not be a household name just yet, but President Barack Obama's former top speechwriter Jon Favreau was welcomed like a rock star at Elmhurst College on Thursday night.

So it was striking to hear the polished 35-year-old whose podcast "Pod Save America" is the third most downloaded in the nation on iTunes tell his overwhelmingly liberal audience that President Donald Trump's adviser Kellyanne Conway was right about the election.

"I hate quoting Kellyanne Conway here," Favreau told a standing-room only audience of hundreds at the Christian college's Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel. "But one thing she said after the election, was 'At the end of the day it wasn't about what offended people it was about what affected people.'"

Favreau met Obama at the tender age of 23 when, while working on John Kerry's presidential campaign, he was tasked with telling Obama to remove the best line from his famous 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, so that Kerry could use it for himself. He went on to work for Obama until 2013, having a hand in all of his most famous speeches, was spotted out on the town with actress Rashida Jones, and became something of a heartthrob for young Democrats.

His point on Thursday about Conway and Trump, he said, was that Democrats needed to focus on policy, not Trump's tweets and "outrages," in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. "It's not about what a politician says, it's about what policies they have and how they affect people."

Favreau mostly stayed on safe ground, feeding his audience well-received red meat lines disparaging the Trump White House, playing up Obama's accomplishments and calling for a politics of daring and "authenticity." Aside from a couple of expletives that he dropped into a question and answer session at the end of his speech (incongruous in the church setting), he looked remarkably like a man ready to run for office, a suggestion he didn't exactly squish when Chicago Inc. put it to him.

"For now, I'm better off doing what I'm doing," he said. "I don't say a hard 'no' because I always encourage people to run and I want young people to run for office, but I don't know that it's for me."

Writing for himself, he said, was hard at first. "It took me a while to get my own voice back, but now I have it, it will be hard to go back to writing for someone else."

kjanssen@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @kimjnews

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Obama speechwriter: Kellyanne Conway was right about election - Chicago Tribune