Abraham Lincoln's "folksiness"

Some have said today that Palin was a bit "folksy" last night.
In Lincoln A Photobiography by Russell Freedman, it says: "... Lincoln had little formal 'eddication,' as he would have pronounced it. Almost everything he "larned" he taught himself. All his life he said "thar" for there, "git" for get, "kin" for can. Even so, he became an eloquent public speaker who could hold a vast audience spellbound, and a great writer whose whose finest phrases still ring in our ears. " (pg. 4)