Thank you, Michael. It's good to have these speeches within paper covers--Humphrey with McGovern, Hoover right next to FDR. And the latter juxtaposition is where I'll start my little meditation on the significance of great speeches, and also their limits.

I don't think I've ever read a Hoover speech before. You know, this one, a week before he beat Al Smith, isn't half bad. Of course, a tribute to rugged individualism sounded better on October 23, 1928 than it would have on July 2, 1932, when Roosevelt gave his great "New Deal" speech. But for all its stuffiness, it hangs together. It addresses the voters as grown-ups. It makes an argument. It And--bonus!--it even embraces liberalism as "a force truly of the spirit." This liberalism, Hoover insists, "is no system of laissez faire." (French yet!)

But the difference between Hoover's speech and Roosevelt's is not just four years of crash, unemployment and social misery. It's also the difference between an uninspired speech and an inspired one. Roosevelt makes an argument, of course, but he's witty, too: Trickle-down theory "belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776." He's clear about who the adversaries are: not the "Republican Party" but the "Republican leadership" (Barack Obama, are you listening?). He's sparing with metaphor but trenchant when he indulges: "During the past ten years a Nation of 120,000,000 people has been led by the Republican leaders to erect an impregnable barbed wire entanglement around its borders through the instrumentality of tariffs which has isolated us from all the other human beings in all the rest of the round world."

He addresses his listeners directly: "Go into the home of the business man. He knows what the tariff has done for him. Go into the home of the factory worker...." He's blunt about values: "My program, of which I can only touch on these points, is based upon this simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it."

I want to keep quoting FDR. But I'll try to make my own point.

What's the use of an inspired speech? For one thing, it makes some people want to keep quoting it. Some will be intellectuals, some won't. There's something memorable in it. Today we say--a sign of our reduced language--that it "brands" a politician. For another, it mobilizes people. It stirs them into remembering why they should care a whit about politics at all.

It's more important for Democrats to give inspired speeches than it is for Republicans. Democrats have to mobilize the left-outs, the disgruntled, the outsiders. Republicans benefit when the electorate contracts.

But it must be faced that Lincolns, FDRs and (yes) Obamas don't come along very often, and even when they do, people will have spent far more minutes hearing sound bites than whole speeches. The sound bites sometimes stand for something resonant, something worth knowing about the candidate, but more often they're the cheapest, most degrading, stupefying substitutes for grown-up discourse. "There you go again," "I paid for this microphone," "Read my lips," "An American President for America," "Change you can believe in"--please. It's a miracle if someone speaks in whole sentences that are unembarrassed to make use of dependent clauses.

This is not snobbery speaking. When sound-bites displace rhetoric (lovely word!), the sweep of political possibility contracts. Politics is made by people who connect with politicians. To paraphrase an old Mel Brooks line, they are all singing, he or she has the voice.

Obama seems to want a transformational politics. If big changes are to come to pass, he has to arouse a public that, other things being equal, would rather play with its gadgets. He needs to mobilize. His speeches need to do that.