First of all, I want to thank Lila Shapiro at TPM as well as Matt Dallek, Todd Gitlin and Andrei Cherny for their posts this week. It's been a great discussion.

I wanted to sum up with one of my big takeaways from working on Live from the Campaign Trail - the extraordinarily powerful role of political stereotype in our campaign discourse. "Liberal tax-and spenders," "GOP isolationists," "blame America-firsters" and "extremists;" these are just a few of the overarching political caricatures that have come to define American politics in the 20th century. We've become so inured to these short-hand characterizations that many of our political debates on the campaign trail are spent either inoculating politicians from them - or perpetuating them. To be sure, flippant political characterizations are nothing new in American politics. In the forty years after the Civil War, there was hardly a Republican politician who missed an opportunity to wave the so-called "bloody shirt," of Democratic rebellion. In the 30s, 40s and 50s Democratic politicians pretty much ran against the ghost of Herbert Hoover and the perception of Republican heartlessness and isolationism that Franklin Roosevelt helped perpetuate.

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Thanks to Andrei for a great post. He really put his finger on an issue that I think is central to understanding Barack Obama's political ascendancy:

"This is not to say that Obama lacks substance or has not delivered enough wonky policy speeches. Neither is close to the case. However, his poetic call to renewal on caucus night made clear that he was making an argument in this presidential race, not just presenting a laundry list. Where most Democratic presidential candidates seem to be running for head of government, Barack Obama is running for head of state. That's why their speeches sound like a State of the Union; his sound like an inaugural address."

I couldn't agree more with this and only wish I had written it myself! One of the more interesting takeaways I had from researching my book was the extent to which presidential candidates rarely got into the specifics of policy issues.

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Thanks, Michael, Todd and Andrei, for your perceptive and thoughtful posts. Let me pick up on a theme running through our conversation--ie...why do we consider some campaign oratory "great"? While I think the larger context (as I said in my earlier post) is crucial to understanding any piece of political speechmaking, I also believe that great oratory must also inspire and mobilize (as Todd pointed out), provide an affirmative vision, laden with ideas, of America's future (as Michael and Andrei say) -- and that great speeches frame issues and controversies in new ways that show us who we are as a country and redefine prorgressivism at particular moments in time.

Let me offer an imperfect, but hopefully useful, analogy: When I was in college, I had a terrific art history teacher who often devoted the entire lecture to a single painting. He would use a single piece of art as a vehichle to highlight such issues as gender relations, class conflict, political power, architectural history, and issues of identity and philosophy in Renaissance-era Florence. So I learned a lot about numerous subjects about that society not simply because the brushstrokes were superior and the artists were technically skilled, but also because the paintings revealed differing aspects of the issues and divisions in 16th-century Florence.

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Membership in Reaganism requires a deeper commitment, and for that an institutional base is being built. At the cornerstone are the fundamentalist churches and their rapidly growing school system, which threatens the health and even the life of public education; about a thousand new religious elementary schools were opened this year. Alongside are the foundations and think tanks, the military and militaristic institutions, sports and celebrations, broadcasting and publishing, volunteer and charitable institutions and a new breed of ideologically oriented businesses. Amway sales agents are Reaganist cadre; so are R.O.T.C. trainees, weekend "survival game" players, religious disk jockeys and Bible salesmen, and certain professional athletes. Everyone who watched the World Series heard that the San Diego Padres' pitching staff is stuffed with John Birchers. The Olympics became a Reaganist spectacle, and the chant "U.S.A. ! U.S.A.!" was appropriated for Reagan-Bush rallies.

-- "The Age of Reaganism" by Andrew Kopkind, The Nation, November 3, 1984

Sophisticates might have sneered at his TV commercials depicting an America of Norman Rockwell prosperity and harmony, at the chants of "U.S.A.!" that carried over from the Olympics to rock Reagan rallies. But the President correctly divined that Americans were yearning to experience once more the emotions of pride and patriotism.

-- "They Also Made History" by George Church, Time, January 7, 1985

Barack Obama's ascendancy is a clear refutation of the canard that in this age of six second soundbites and thirty second attack ads the power of oratory has been diminished.

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Thanks to Todd and Matt for their great posts and I want to pick up on a point that Matt made about the importance of context in great speechwriting. Matt was absolutely right to highlight it: the most effective campaign speeches have generally been those that most closely reflected the desires of the American people.

As Todd Gitlin noted, Herbert Hoover's "tribute to rugged individualism" was a product of a specific moment in history - the calm before the storm of the Great Depression. As the famed historian Richard Hofstadter said of our 29th President, "The things Hoover believed in - efficiency, enterprise, opportunity, individualism, substantial laissez-faire, personal success, material welfare - were all in the dominant American tradition. The ideas he represented - ideas that to so many people made him seem hateful or ridiculous after 1929 - were precisely the same ideas that in the remotest past of the nineteenth century and the more immediate past of the New Era had had an almost irresistible lure for the majority of Americans."

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Thanks, Michael, for inviting me to participate and comment on your book. Let me pick up on one thing you said in your post: I would argue that while words and ideas certainly matter in any presidential campaign oratory, I think there's a third factor at work here, beyond the words and the ideas behind a particular speech -- namely, the intersection of social currents and the larger context in which any speech is given.

Michael, in essence, makes this argument in his book -- providing perceptive analyses of the speeches he includes, describing the larger world of ideology, social movements, and political rivalries that help frame and make a speech memorable. Similarly, Garry Wills and Thurston Clarke wrote books about single speeches (Lincoln's Gettysburg address and JFK's inaugural, respectively), shedding new light on seminal addresses by examining the wider world in which the speeches were delivered.

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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."

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Let me first take this opportunity to thank Josh Marshall, Lila Shapiro and all the folks at TPM for giving me the opportunity to talk about Live From the Campaign Trail. It's always humbling to be asked to write about presidential politics; but even more humbling to be asked by the best political blog on the web.

One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I believe that presidential campaigns are actually far more substantive than we generally assume - and that great campaign oratory is not only the best evidence of this phenomenon but is a key element of the success or failure of a presidential candidate. Luckily for my thesis, Barack Obama decided to run for President in 2008.

However, along with Obama's meteoric political rise have come some rather pointed questions about the power of campaign speechwriting - is Obama getting by on his great felicity with rhetoric while glossing over substance? Are his campaign speeches "just words" as some McCain supporters (and former Hillary Clinton backers) like to assert? Beyond the more direct questions about Obama's skills as a speechgiver, there are deeper questions to examine: can Obama's fundamentally affirmative campaign message overcome the recent negative attacks from John McCain that have tightened up the race? And, are campaigns actually less substantive than I assume and do TV ads, debate performances, even GOTV operations make the real difference on Election Day - and not campaign oratory?

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This week Michael Cohen, professional speechwriter and senior research fellow at the New American Foundation, is joining us to discuss his new book on presidential campaign rhetoric Live From The Campaign Trail. How important are candidates' speechmaking styles vs their key campaign talking points? What have been the most important and compelling speeches of this race thus far? Why are so many of McCain's speeches so-- and there's really no other word for this-- bad? Michael's first post will be up shortly, and he'll flesh out the arguments and questions more thoroughly.

Along for the ride: former Gore speechwriter and West Wing contributor Eli Attie, Andrei Cherny, chief speechwriter for John Kerry in 2004 and author of The Candy Bombers, sociologist and political writer Todd Gitlin and Matt Dallek, Adjunct Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech. Should be a great discussion. Join us!