Keep Your Eye on This Place

http://change.gov

More web-based brilliance from the Obama camp.

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Is History Repeating Itself?

This is absolutely fascinating. If you ever wondered how facility with language played out in leadership and politics, this is your book. I've always been amazed at national politicians who are tongue tied. I could never understand how a person who cannot articulate, could think and lead and inspire and do all those things that leadership asks of a person. And we do seem to have some evidence (especially lately) that there might be a correlation between poor language skills and poor leadership skills. Now here's the big question. Will Obama's astonishing facility with language deliver the leadership and vision we all really need right now?

Here's the book and an excerpt from the review. The link is below.

LINCOLN

The Biography of a Writer

By Fred Kaplan

A former Illinois state legislator, with a short stint in Congress under his belt, comes to national prominence with speeches that showcase his eloquence. He is, according to the author of this new book, something of a cool customer: calm and graceful under pressure, “a difficult man to read, who loved jokes and stories” but who was otherwise remarkably self-contained.

This former lawyer runs as “a stoic moderate,” embracing the virtues of “balance, temperance and restraint”; as a campaigner he emphasizes a reasoned “analysis of issues rather than personalities.” His poetic gifts as a writer, shaped by a lifetime of avid reading, are matched by a lawyer’s appreciation of precision; his writings project “a persona of dignified but amiable authenticity,” and do so with a “concision of phrasing and logical tightness.” In his run for office he is criticized for being too inexperienced to be president and for failing to support the troops, because he’d questioned an American invasion of a country he claimed was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.” His vision of America is an optimistic one of reconciliation — to “help make strangers into neighbors,” in the words of this biographer, “to create sympathy between regions and nations, and, by inference, between the North and South.”

Sound familiar?

The whole review is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/books/07book.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin