The Man Can Write

One of the best American writers of the 19th century was an American President, and that's saying something given who was writing in America in the 19th century: Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, just to name a few.  But none wrote more powerfully than Abraham Lincoln.

In the 21st Obama contends among our best writers, although you never really know how much of what you hear from a President he actually wrote himself. But, at the very least, you can say the man knows good writing when he sees it and he claims it.

Consider:
"We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense."

Can you imagine George Bush, or even Ronald Reagan, Inc. or any Republican alive today saying this as simply, forcefully, directly and evocatively?
Not a chance. None of them have it in them. They are, down to the last of them, empty suits.
No so,  for the leader of the Democratic Party and the President of the United States.

The man can write.