Jeff Flake

We are no longer used to great Senate speeches. The Greatest Deliberative Body on Earth has long since given up anything a thinking person would confuse with deliberation. The Senate speech, once form of storied oratory, has withered as the body itself has degraded. It's partly the fault of C-SPAN, which made possible the address to an empty chamber, the confusion of an actual audience with a television audience—the idea that a Senate speech was a vehicle for national dissemination of talking points, rather than a means of persuading one's colleagues of things one truly believed.