“Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.”

We ask that question knowing that speechmaking genius is not and has never been essential to a successful presidency. Over the past century, the list of presidents we lift up as especially gifted speakers is short — Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Obama.

In editing a collection of Obama’s speeches, “We Are the Change We Seek,” published last week, we were struck that while he drew on all these presidential forebears in his approach to persuasion, his first political love was Abraham Lincoln. This was a sensible choice for a politician from Illinois who had declared his presidential candidacy in Lincoln’s adopted hometown of Springfield and whose election as the first African American president fulfilled the work of the Great Emancipator.

Obama had something else in common with Lincoln: a view that the best way to redeem the promise of justice is to insist that it was right there from the country’s very beginning, inherent in its founding documents. Obama bound himself to our past to change our future.

Indeed, only a few presidents (Lincoln was one) have shared Obama’s inclination to offer his fellow citizens a running class in American history and its meaning. This, wrote the historian James T. Kloppenberg in his book “Reading Obama,” reflected how Obama saw the complicated lessons of America’s saga as a road map for where it should move next. Obama, Kloppenberg wrote, “has learned congruent lessons from multiple sources,” and summarized them this way:

“Democracy works best when rights are balanced against responsibilities. Democracy requires compromise, not because it is the path of least resistance but because people can learn from each other, and because lasting change demands widespread popular assent. Change in America is a work of decades, not months or even years. Obama also learned, from absorbing all these lessons, that a culture’s only home is to be found in its tortured history.”