Great quotes from Obama speeches. When his vocabulary fails, there are neologisms to substitute.

Er...there aren't too many. Oh, wait..." Yes We Can!"
Yes We Can/Si Se Puede: Remembering and Forgetting Cesar Chavez (March 31, 1927—April 23, 1993) By Luis Leon
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/humanrights/1351/
Perhaps the most memorable slogan to emerge from the 2008 presidential campaign was the inspiring phrase, “Yes We Can.” This utterance alone embodied the inspirational spirit of a new and hopeful political age. However, as Barack Obama himself admits (albeit belatedly), the mantra was coined over forty years ago in the hot and dusty agricultural fields of California’s central valley by a Mexican-American man, obscure, but nonetheless determined to transform history: Cesar Chavez...Now safely ensconced in the White House and enjoying high approval ratings, the president can give Chavez his due credit. By contrast, just last year at this time, candidate Obama had not yet cited Chavez as the author for his campaign slogan, but he had in some ways gone farther; the candidate had proposed that Chavez’s birthday become a national holiday...Sadly, the president seems to have forgotten his promise to declare a national holiday in honor of the man whose legacy continues to influence our politics, and our lives.***It already sufficed to placate the Latino vote so keeping the promise means nothing more. The editor, Geoffrey O'Brian, of the next edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, says that he is planning to include just one from Obama's Presidency thus far: when he called the U.S. "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers". This is noteworthy because it is so startlingly inaccurate. While the Judeo-Christian antecedents of the U.S. are clear, the citation of Muslims ( especially in a position of equality with Christians ) and Hindus does not convey truth. The inclusion of nonbelievers, which accurate, seems gratuitous. So, this is the best so far?***
http://tinyurl.com/ydqdyjo
CAPITAL CULTURE: Critics assess Obama's speeches By HILLEL ITALIE AP
NEW YORK (AP) - As a supporter of Barack Obama for president, former JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen welcomed the young Democrat as a winning, Kennedy-esque orator...But as Obama prepares to deliver his first State of the Union address, Sorensen wonders if the president hasn't become more like the politicians he supposedly displaced....But even admirers have a hard time remembering what he actually says. Ted Widmer, who edited an anthology of political speeches for the Library of America, praised Obama for his "masterful" style, but could not cite a specific line the president said. Similar observations were made by Jeff Shesol, David Frum and Harry C. McPherson, who wrote speeches for presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson, respectively. "The speech he made in Cairo _ I remember the intelligence, the breadth and the reasonableness," McPherson says. "But I can't tell you, and this is one of the shortcomings of the kind of speech he makes _ I can't quote anything, or cite anything, off the top of my head."****Perhaps only the recollection is one of reasonableness because the trancript conveys an obeisance to a part of the world which has declared war on us and murdered thousands of our citizens.****...White House spokesman Bill Burton. "And though people may not remember particular lines or phrases from every speech, when he is done speaking, people always get a sense of who the president is and exactly where he is coming from."****Perhaps not. One of his professors at Harvard Law recalls his speeches while RUNNING for President of the Harvard Law Review ("when he was finishe...d, both sides thought he was endorsing their--opposing-- positions.") "Obama is very strong at sort of coolly laying out issues, which may not be memorable, but is effective," O'Brien says. "When he was running for president, he had to draw on a more impassioned style. He was addressing huge crowds of people."****Where he indulged the repetitive nonsense of some churches with "We are the people we are waiting for." (Evidently also not original nonsense.Cf "in April 2007, Thomas Friedman was taken to task for not only misquoting the phrase in his New York Times column but also for not giving proper credit for the source from which it came.Friedman doesn't quite get the quote right and he doesn't credit the author of the phrase We are the people we have been waiting for. She is the late poet June Jordan. The phrase we are the ones we have been waiting for from 'Poem for South African Women' (1980) was picked up by many graduation speakers ... and others including most notably the singers Sweet Honey in the Rock who made the phrase into a song and Alice Walker who took the phrase as title for her most recent collection of essays (2006). )****...Fred R. Shapiro, who edits the Yale Book of Quotations, mentioned a few phrases from Obama's inaugural speech that could make the next edition some years from now. He cites Obama's insistence that "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals" in the fight against terrorism, and that "a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."****Does the first of these compare favorably to Benjamin Franklin's famous quote, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."? ****... Shapiro doesn't think that any of his presidential statements have caught on widely ...not at the level of then-candidate Obama's private observation in 2008 that small-town Americans "cling to guns or religion."...
"I think it's very important for people to remember the words. Words have power. A successful speech will resonate and phrases will provide a kind of power in the near term and the longer term," Shesol said. "But, ultimately, it's important to any president to be able to make continually clear who he is, what he believes and where he wants to go."...****Right. The Cambridge police acted stupidly. The Christmas bomber was an isolated incident. We are one of the largest Muslim countries. ...Let's not forget the accusations (and fact) of plagiarism http://tinyurl.com/2ujx8w Let's not forget "wee-wee'd up", a phrase whose meaning is still unclear months after it was uttered.****