Finding Political Strength in the Power of Words

"It comes from his sense of an audience," said Gerald Shuster, an expert in political communication at the University of Pittsburgh. "He's doing a lot of impromptu when he gets to the stage; he looks out over the audience and has the ability to adjust it."

The clearest comparison, the experts say, is to John F. Kennedy, who like Obama was able to mix high seriousness and humor. The shared cadences with Kennedy are not entirely a surprise -- Obama's young speechwriters are steeped in the addresses of Kennedy and his brother Robert, and the campaign has been getting informal advice from Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

But not even Kennedy was perceived as relying on his speaking skills as much as Obama is. "The main difference was that the 1960 campaign was much more substantive than the current campaign," Medhurst said. "There was no criticism of his eloquence or speaking ability," he said of Kennedy.

If Obama has not fallen into a rut as a speaker, it may be partly because he has only recently started performing at the level he is now. Though his oratory has invited comparisons to Kennedy and King (comparisons that make his critics scoff), he was not raised in a deep oral tradition as those men were -- King in his father's Atlanta church and Kennedy among Irish American pols and raconteurs and elite prep schools that stressed rhetoric.

In Obama's telling, he did not recognize the power of public speaking until he participated in an anti-apartheid rally in college and discovered that he had captured the demonstrators when he took the microphone. "The crowd was quiet now, watching me," he wrote in his 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father." "Somebody started to clap. 'Go on with it, Barack,' somebody else shouted. 'Tell it like it is.' Then the others started in, clapping, cheering, and I knew that I had them, that the connection had been made."

As a community organizer in Chicago after college, Obama learned to make an activist pitch before small groups, but he often stepped back to let local residents who had joined the cause take the lead in speaking at events. At Harvard Law School, classmates recall being struck by Obama's deftness as a speaker in the classroom and in small discussions at the Law Review.

"There was a perception that this is a very gifted individual who has a way with words and an interest and ability in communication," said classmate Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer and former associate counsel in the Bush administration. But "these rhetorical and oratorical gifts have clearly developed and reached their full flower in the course of his adult political career."

That growth took a while. In the Illinois Senate, few recalled much memorable rhetoric from Obama, maybe because there was so little opportunity for it. "When you're speaking about a bill that increases the penalty for the possession of cannabis, how much can you address posterity in a speech like that?" said state Sen. Steven Rauschenberger, a Republican who served with Obama.

Obama's first real chance to address matters of higher import came in 2002, when he spoke at a rally against invading Iraq. Marilyn Katz, a longtime Chicago public relations consultant who helped organize the event, recalls it as a kind of coming-out for Obama as a public speaker.

"People who'd never heard of him said, 'Who is this guy?' " Katz said.

State Sen. Denny Jacobs, who served with Obama, said Obama may have learned some lessons from his unsuccessful 2000 bid for the congressional seat of Rep. Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther leader. Friends and advisers told Obama that he had failed to connect with many voters because his rhetoric was too wonkish and Ivy League for their tastes. "He talked above people," Jacobs said.

Running for the U.S. Senate four years later, Jacobs said, Obama adopted the main elements of the uplifting, unifying rhetoric he uses today, which Jacobs said offered much broader appeal. Instead of, say, dwelling on the details of welfare or health-care policy, he tied them to themes of "hope and change and the future," he said.