This work is intended as a contribution to the understanding of the contemporary Brazilian political scene: it integrates Socio-interactional Narrative Analysis with political discourse aiming to offer a linguist`s perspective on president Lula`s continued popularity. Personal stories embedded in six speeches delivered by the president between April 2006 and March 2007 form the corpus of this analysis. Freely based on Labov`s narrative model and on Linde´s notion of life story, and also resorting to the notion of frame as per Bateson and Goffman, and to Goffman`s footing, the analysis identifies several self- presentations constructed and displayed by president Lula through those personal stories: Northeastern migrant, blue collar worker, union leader, father and president. By showing how these identities are narratively constructed, the analysis emphasizes projected character traits and singularities of meaning and indicates, in relation to the different audiences of the president´s speeches, how these meanings and identities can obtain alignments and function as a pre-condition for achieving persuasion, the basic objective of political discourse in general.