Even compared to McCain, Obama was never a good speaker. And McCain is easily the weakest of the bunch you listed.

You like him because you wanted to believe.

I think his reputation partially arose out of the contrast with Bush, whose public speaking was simply execrable. Plus, Obama *can* deliver an excellent speech, though I don't think the audience is the only factor; I suspect he was better off when he could spend more time practicing.

I have never understood the thumping-the-podium thing, even though so many speakers do it. I learned not to do that when I was 10 or so. Obama also has a strange little hesitation stammer from time to time, especially when he's speaking off the cuff.

I don't quite know why we don't produce better public speakers in the US. I wish we did; it gets tiring to listen to these guys.

Oh... and the State of the Union speech where Bush made mules of the Democrats in the crowd | where he nailed them with the timing of the punch line - Best eva'

Jason : he's not a great speaker no matter who you compare him with. Just because you're better than McCain doesn't make you great, even by contemporary standards. To be great you must, first and for most, be great, not just better than your opponent.

@Jason: quite. Heck, plenty of people in Obama's audience were too young to remember Reagan, and were comparing him to the other common speakers at the time. Yes, Palin's convention speech was excellent, but she was (and has been) a disaster after that--more of a disaster than Obama has ever been. McCain has always been a mediocre speaker, as has Hillary, and W--well, his speeches are better read than heard.

How can you be a great speaker if you largely use vacant, fill-in-the-meaning-yourself words? His speeches rarely lack any real substance, and I don't mean that just because he's a leftist. Many of us, with a little practice, can pretend to give great oratory by reading a teleprompter. But if the sincerity is not there, it's just meaningless blather.

His speeches are just calculated political pandering.

Between the nutters baselessly asserting that the Libyan opposition= Al Qaeda and this, a day-long thread about the rhetorical merit of Barack Obama's war speech, the Corner is marking a new low in the quality of its foreign policy analysis. Is there an adult in the building?

No Jason, the only reason he's considered great is because in the words of Harry Reid, He's clean, well spoken, and doesn't speak with a negro accent. That, after all, was all the Democrats were looking for, and that's all they got.

Just yesterday, Jason was trying to convince everyone that the Republicans were somehow duty bound to vote for any deal that Reid and Obama negotiate. (While at the same time, Democrats had no such obligation.) He also tried to pass off the whopper that there were no Democrats who wanted govt to shut down rather than compromise. As always, he says whatever he thinks will help the Demcorats the most.