Obama’s Lincoln

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Every crisis President adopts Abraham Lincoln as their personal political savior.

The first Roosevelt wore a ring with a lock his his hair, the second hired a Lincoln biographer to write his speeches. Nixon talked to Lincoln's portrait.

What these Presidents were looking for from Lincoln was strength. Lincoln was hated in his time, both north and south. His own Republican partisans distrusted him as weak, and many southerners still consider him a war criminal.

Barack Obama has identified heavily with Lincoln. You may joke he's got the lobes for it. Both are long and lanky Illinoisians who seemed to come from nowhere at a time of crisis. For most that's all they see.

Today, in the Capitol Rotunda, the President revealed which of the many Lincolns of our imagination he is talking about.

The reconciler:

In the war's final weeks, aboard Grant's flagship, The River Queen, President Lincoln was asked what was to be done with the rebel armies once General Lee surrendered. With victory at hand, Lincoln could have sought revenge. He could have forced the South to pay a steep price for their rebellion. But despite all the bloodshed and all the misery that each side had exacted upon the other, and despite his absolute certainty in the rightness of the cause of ending slavery, no Confederate soldier was to be punished, Lincoln ordered. They were to be treated, as he put it, "liberally all round."

Note that the President did not quote any of the man's great speeches, just an off-hand comment that spoke to what the country most needed, a true peace of the heart.

At the center of our present political strife is the fact that we have been engaged for a generation in a Second Civil War. It began as a generational conflict over Vietnam, but transformed over time into a cultural conflict in which neither Red nor Blue America could or would see the basic humanity of the other side.

The last decade has seen the climax of that struggle. The Clinton Impeachment. The 2000 election. The struggle over Iraq and the 2004 election. The entire Bush agenda seemed, to Democrats, like an insane effort to destroy them and everything they believed in. Slowly, gradually, Democrats grew backbones, as northerners had over the course of their Civil War, until politics became what that war in time became — all hell.

Americans have become united, in their cynicism, in an innate distrust of all who hold power, of all institutions, of all who do not not share our particular worldview — whatever it happens to be. It has become a war of all against all. And so we have all acted in self-interest, despoiling the environment, destroying the economy, relying on the weapons of war to win the peace.

Lincoln lived through just such a transformation. He even helped lead it. But he never stopped regretting it and he never stopped believing that reconciliation was possible. Even though, in his time, it was not.

There is an innate decency in all of us. In Rush Limbaugh, in David Sirota, in Chris "50 Cent" Jackson, even in David Vitter. Without that decency democracy cannot survive. If we did not have it the American system could not have made it to this day.

These are the "better angels of our nature" Lincoln called us to at his Second Inaugural, but again note that the President did not go to the cliche. The lesson was more important, the need to unite as "one nation and one people" in order to confront the planetary crisis that faces us.

Most analysts who watched President Obama today derided the Lincoln comparison, claiming we face nothing so large as what he faced. They are wrong. We do. We face something much larger, the possible end to human life, on this planet, in the life spans of children now living.

The War Against Oil is just the first step in this larger struggle. We must find a way to restore the planetary ecosystem, the predator-prey dance on which evolution is based. But one step at a time, although this was also the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin.

First unity. Then we dig ourselves out of the hole our hate has made for us. We seek reconciliation among all peoples of the world.

Then, only then, can we really begin the hard work, the long uphill climb, that will define the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children.

Saving the planet from the contagion that is mankind.