Gettysburg College historian Allen Guelzo suggests to National Review Online readers this morning that our 44th president and Honest Abe have little in common.
[N]ot too many are signing on to Barack Obama’s version of this perennial presidential passion play. One reason for the skepticism is the contrast between the almost-untouchable media status Obama has enjoyed, and the raw brutality with which Lincoln was boiled in the oil of hostile politics.
As the first anti-slavery, Republican president, Lincoln was damned without recoil by those who hated him as an abolitionist fanatic, as “Abraham Africanus the First,” dreaming of racial civil war and lusting after racial intermarriage (the critics made no attempt to reconcile the two). His allies and supporters were hardly better. The veteran Republican senator from Ohio, Benjamin Wade, wearily dismissed Lincoln as “born of poor white trash, and educated in a slave state.” Disbelieving literati posed the question, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers for him?” and sophisticates like Lincoln’s Philadelphia-born general, George McClellan, sneered at Lincoln as “an idiot” and “the original gorilla.”
Barack Obama, by contrast, rocketed up the ladder of privilege, from Punahou School to Harvard Law. He has been gifted with an eloquence unusual even for presidents, and an elegance of manner that the presidency has lacked since Ronald Reagan, perhaps even since Jack Kennedy. And the adulation with which he was hailed at his political debut at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 — and at his nomination and election in 2008, and his inaugural in 2009 — bordered disturbingly on the mystical.
From that height, Obama has fallen a long, long way; but he has not fallen nearly so hard or so long as he thinks when compared with Lincoln.
