Obamatoric

Sunday found The Guardian writing, I believe an op-ed piece (I could be wrong) about what makes Obama's speeches captivating, boiling it down to essentially that he knows how to tell a story.

You can read the article here (and you should, it's pretty good).

For instance:

Obama, like a good writer and a better politician, seems to understand that, as much as gorgeous language or big ideas, what matters is story, story, story, a national narrative. That, in a riveting psychodrama, was what he supplied on the steps of the Capitol.

His 18-minute speech, low on rhetoric, was just brutal. He simply slew his predecessor in front of a global audience. It was done, politely, with a surgical efficiency but, breaking with a tradition of inaugural niceness, it was still the visceral, close-quarter knifing of a rejected leader. Among many lethal thrusts, the killer line was: "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."