Obama's oratory: A gifted speaker has unfinished business for inaugural address At his very worst - and that would be during the first presidential debate last year - he can be disengaged and grumpy, like a man who's annoyed he's going to miss SportsCenter. The academics who study political communication say Obama has unfinished business. They point out that, although Obama has some signature speeches - including the healing speeches after the mass shootings in Tucson and Newtown, Conn. - he still has no signature line as president, no trademark statement. There's no Obama utterance that's the equivalent of, for example, Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" or JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ." He's never produced a phrase as president that's as memorable as what Franklin Roosevelt uttered in March 1933 in his first inaugural address: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." "I can't think of phrases that we particularly associate with this president for this presidency," says David Birdsell, dean of the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College. I think that's unusual. Even if it's something as inartful as "I'm the decider" " - that being an off-the-cuff line from President George W. Bush in 2006 ("I'm the decider, and I decide what is best"). For now, Obama's most famous words include "Hope," "Change," "Change we can believe in" and "Yes, we can," the buzzwords and slogans during his first presidential campaign. All of them better than his bland re-election slogan, "Forward." And, of course, there's that riff that made him famous way back when: "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America." That was his first big speech, the one in which he introduced himself to the country, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. From the moment he announced his presidential candidacy, his speeches were compared to rock concerts, with astonishing crowds - 5,000 people, 10,000 people, 25,000 people. With audiences like that, he had to develop a certain kind of rhetoric, the language of a man leading a political movement, long on emotion and aspiration. He'd written books, knew how to craft a good line and was able to own his words in a way that someone who relies entirely on speechwriters couldn't. One of Obama's best speeches, Birdsell said, was on the night of Jan. 3, 2008, when he'd just won the Iowa caucuses - a black man running in a nearly all-white state against the Clinton machine. His tone had the cadence of a preacher in the pulpit: