I think [President Obama] ranks with the best speakers in my lifetime, and by far the best of the modern presidents. What Obama has done, and is doing, is rehabilitating rhetoric itself. When he gives a major address, such as Wednesday's State of the Union, you hear a leader actually thinking through a difficult issue in public, taking a skeptical, even critical audience down a careful line of reasoning toward a new way of thinking. It is, traditionally, one of the central roles of statesmanship.

... the most remarkable of Obama's speeches are so deeply rooted in his own identity, experience and ideas that it is clear he has shaped them himself. And his cool, cerebral style is what some of us prefer.
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Substantive rhetoric like [Obama's] is more than just an atmospheric improvement. The decline of public speaking in this country contributes to a culture of political stalemate. When political debate consists of rival camps hurling stink bombs at each other over an impassable ideological wall, it suggests there are no answers to the serious problems of our day, only conflict. Politics ceases to be the art of resolving that conflict through dialogue, reason, and compromise, and becomes a form of entertainment.

Restoring substantive argument to political debate reasserts the importance of statesmanship. It sees the higher calling of politics, which is to make things happen in a democracy. It is one thing to take heroic stands on principle, to give ringing speeches full of applause lines or to revel in what Obama called in Oslo "the satisfying purity of indignation."

It is quite another to treat an audience like thinking adults, capable of wrestling with hard truths, and willing to reason their way to answers.