What gets done rides on rhetoric not logic

From "Public Sentiment Is Everything": Lincoln's View of Political Persuasionby David Zarefsky via Althouse.

Abraham Lincoln

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

Lincoln appears to me to be making the practical observation that an argument built on logic and data is well and good but what gets done rides on rhetoric not logic.