This is a campaign year, and the windbags sure are busy and full of themselves. Some of them are out there on the campaign trail, some of them here on the editorial pages. They love compound sentences, and they profess to have complex thoughts. But in politics, as in life, it’s often the simple sentence that matters, and the simple thought that endures.

Twice in the last month I’ve professed a weakness for an American politician who has fallen from favor and, finally, from memory. He’s Calvin Coolidge, remembered, terribly unfairly, as a simpleton but in truth the master of the simple truth. There is a very important difference.

In any case, my casual asides about Silent Cal prompted a friend to send me a little book from 1919, a collection of the speeches Coolidge made in his Massachusetts gubernatorial re-election campaign. It is a first edition, necessarily; there almost certainly was no cause for a second edition of a volume like this. Only a collector would have it, or want it.

But at an idle moment (and even editors have them from time to time), I thumbed through this little book and discovered some extraordinary treasures. You find them sometimes in the most unlikely places. But they are a reminder that, as Grace Coolidge, his wife, recalled many years later in a volume called “Meet Calvin Coolidge,” the 30th president had a mind like “a well-ordered household.”

But it was more than his mind that was ordered. It was his heart as well.

“Among Calvin Coolidge’s fine qualities, two stand out above all others — common sense and sound character,” Claude M. Fuess, an Amherst historian, wrote in his much-neglected but, to me, much-loved biography of the 30th president.

And so I was transfixed by remarks in my little book that were delivered by Coolidge on Nov. 1, 1919, only four days before the election. Read them and tell me if they do not speak to our lives as much as some of the more familiar comments of more florid figures from today’s newspaper, or from history:

The conduct of public affairs is not a game. Responsible office does not go to the crafty. Governments are not founded upon an association for public plunder but on the cooperation of men wherein each is seeking to do his duty.

This speech was delivered nearly a year to the day after the end of World War I, which was called the Great War at the time, and for a reason.

Coolidge’s legacy as a foreign-policy-maker is spare, consisting almost entirely of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928 — forgettable except for the deeply idealistic impulse that lay beneath it, the effort to outlaw war.

Here, nine years earlier, is Coolidge on democracy. President Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry would do well to deliver remarks like these:

There are among us a great mass of people who have been reared for generations under a government of tyranny and oppression. It is ingrained in their blood that there is no other form of government. They are disposed and inclined to think our institutions partake of the same nature as these they have left behind. We know they are wrong. They must be shown they are wrong.

Now pause and read these next four sentences aloud. They are as powerful as any four sentences that have been uttered so far in the year 2004:

There is a just government. There are righteous laws. We know the formula by which they are produced. The principle is best stated in the immortal Declaration of Independence to be “the consent of the governed.”

And if the president’s speechwriters, or Kerry’s, are looking for a presidential quotation about the value of the political arts — no easy task, mind you — these two sentences would do fine:

Good government cannot be bought, it has to be given. Office has great opportunities for doing wrong, but equal chance for doing right.

Let me add one more thing about President Coolidge. He wrote his own material. He wrote his speeches, Mrs. Coolidge said, on “sheets of foolscap paper in pencil, going over them again and again, changing a word here, a word there, transposing and rewriting with infinite pains.” Later, in the White House, he dictated his speeches to a stenographer. (Sometimes, because the president did not speak very much, the stenographer would sit for hours, pencil in hand, pad on his lap, while Coolidge said nothing at all. Finally, at the end of the evening, he would tell the young man with the blank steno pad: “That is all. You may come back at 8 in the morning.”)

Anyone familiar with Coolidge does not doubt this for a moment. Indeed, only Coolidge — born in Vermont, sworn in as president in Vermont by his father, a justice of the peace, shortly after the death of Warren G. Harding — could have written my favorite presidential paragraph, delivered at the end of his presidency, during a visit to his home state to inspect the effort to rebuild after the flood of 1927:

Vermont is a state I love. I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield and Equinox without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me. It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride, here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our eternal hills.

So why this diversion into the words of a man almost forgotten today?

Because, as we approach an election between a man who, like Coolidge, is a conservative Republican and another who, like Coolidge, rose to national prominence from his adopted state of Massachusetts, we are reminded of the power of simple truths. No weasel words. No legalisms. And one more thing: No speechwriters, either.

Both men could learn a little something from Calvin Coolidge. So, even now, could we.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.