It's not, I think, an exaggeration to say that Obama is the most able writer to win the presidency since Lincoln.
This article is an excellent, though too brief, look at writing and the presidency, with the president-elect and President Lincoln as the throughline. Among other more favorable views of Obama's writing talents, Raban writes that Barack Obama doesn't reach Lincoln's prowess in terms of wit -- not humor, but wit. He provides as evidence the following 1860 transcript of Lincoln speaking about Kansas and Nebraska and the issue of whether to admit them to the Union as slave or free states:
If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. [Laughter.] I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. [Applause.] Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. [Great laughter.] But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide! [Prolonged applause and cheers.]
I don't know if Barack Obama has this talent for wit. I don't know whether he has a Gettysburg Address in him (his Philadelphia speech on race, A More Perfect Union, was as close as he's come). But we can safely predict that he's going to spend the next four to eight years striving to meet Lincoln's precedent. And we're lucky to be around to observe such a thing.