“Words do inspire,” insists Obama, and talk isn’t cheap. Theodore Roosevelt didn’t get all that much done in his presidency, but he talked about doing a lot. You could snark about his — and Charles Beard, for one, did: “he smote with many a message,” wrote Beard of Roosevelt — and why not? Honest snark is good.

But also, soon after, much of what Roosevelt had spent almost eight years talking about, did get done. Did it matter that TR had given all those progressive ideas and measures voice from the White House? I think so, and so did a fairly critical observer of Roosevelt, Stuart Sherman: “Some appraisers of his merits say that his most notable achievement was building the Panama Canal. I should say that his most notable achievement was creating for the nation the atmosphere in which valor and high seriousness live….” And when Roosevelt died, Edith Wharton wrote, so did a little inspiration for “all men who loved right more than ease.”

Barack Obama gets ready to be Theodore Roosevelt: “There have been periods of time in our history when a president inspired people to do better.”

Another phrase worth mentioning, there, is “the better angels of our nature.”

Obama via Yglesias.