The following quote is from a good piece about what today's campaigns can learn from FDR.

Pre-broadcast era politicians were trained in the art of arm-waving, high-blown oratory. But with the advent of radio, booming rhetoric and grand gestures no longer worked. Roosevelt knew that.

Listen to the way he opened his first chat; it was on the intricate banking crisis facing the nation:

"First of all, let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank the bank does not put the money in a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit -in bonds, in commercial paper, in mortgages, and in many kinds of loans."

To make doubly sure it was clear to the many who did not understand "the mechanics of banking," he added: "In other words, the bank puts your money to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning round." He went on, laying the factual foundation for the predicament at hand: "A comparatively small part of the money that you put into the bank is kept in currency - an amount which in normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the cash needs of the average citizen." Again, to make sure the audience was with him, he added: "In other words, the total amount of all currency in the country is only a comparatively small proportion of the total deposits in all the banks in the country."

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After his short course in banking, he went to the crisis itself: "What, then, happened during the last few days of February and the first few days of March? Because of undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold - a rush so great that the soundest banks couldn't get enough currency to meet the demand."

He continued by answering the question he posed, not leaving to chance the public's conclusion, "The reason for this was that on the spur of the moment it was, of course, impossible to sell perfectly sound assets of a bank and convert them into cash at panic prices far below the real value."

He would then build on that explanation, justifying a "bank holiday" - itself a well-chosen phrase signifying something good, a "holiday" is something that can restore and refresh - and the legislation he got Congress to pass that would reopen the banks, describing the stages of the solution in a simple one, two, three style.

Ending his chat, Roosevelt hit on his underlying theme: "After all, there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people themselves."

FDR moved in for the close by wrapping stark reality within the context not of ideology or partisanship but of personal bonding between himself and the citizenry: "It is your problem, my friends, your problem no less than it is mine. Together, we cannot fail."