I've always had a soft spot for Honest Abe because he and I share a birthday spot on the calendar. By the time I was in third grade, I'd read every biography of the great man I could get my hands on. I used to kid people that being born on Lincoln's birthday meant I would either become president, grow a beard, or get shot.
So the Obama campaigns coopting of the greatest president of our country is sort of a personal insult to me. And these comparisons are embarrassing.
“It’s very hard to say who has a tougher job,” says Holzer. “Is it the man who’s facing a fiscal crisis worse than any since the Depression and also the specter of nuclear war, terrorism, health pandemics, and all of the issues that a 21st century president has to deal with and hopefully solve? Or is it the President who is facing the destruction of the entire country that he’s been elected to lead?”
Is he serious? He wants to compare the disintegration of our nation to an economic slowdown? This sort of thing is insulting and diminishes both men.
Lincoln presided over the single costliest war in U.S. history. We lost more than 600,000 men in that conflict and the economic devastation to the South was unparalleled, taking generations to rebuild. The problems with race relations today can be traced directly back to the fighting of that war and the harshness of Reconstruction after it (why do you think the Texas governor is not the seat of power?).
And outside of the actual human costs, there was the loss of innocence about what the republic was about. If you read the Federalist Papers, there's this implied consent of the states to be joined to the federal government, a consent that can be withdrawn through secession at any time. But Lincoln recognized that a country whose states could withdraw from the union at will was a country without much of a future. While the history taught to children is that the Civil War was all about slavery, there is this other crucial aspect to the fight.
And while I don't dislike Barack Obama (although I'm starting to) and I am happy for a black person to be president, these inflated comparisons to Lincoln are starting to anger me. I pray that Obama doesn't measure up to Lincoln, because it would mean another Civil War here. What Obama will be dealing with are simply the typical difficult duties of being the chief executive of the United States. Of course, he'd be better prepared for it had he actually had some experience, but too many voters wanted style over substance.
UPDATE: The differences are far more obvious.
|