![In the latest issue of the New Republic, my college professor Sean Wilentz seizes on the glut of bicentennial blather to explain “Who Lincoln [Really] Was“—and touches on Obama in the process:
Lincoln may have had his own purposes, like the Almighty, but those purposes always included gaining or maintaining political advantage, often enough by cagey and unexhilarating means. Although he was often unsuccessful, his political cunning was his strength, and not a corrupting weakness. Pure-hearted radicals did not manipulate him into nobility as much as he manipulated them to suit his own political aims—which, as president, were to save the Union and insure that freedom, and not slavery, would prevail in the struggle of the house divided. Unless we understand this, none of Lincoln’s philosophizing, and none of his spare, arresting, and moving rhetoric, makes any sense…
Like any group of able politicians, Obama and his strategists exploited the mood by hyping their Lincoln connections, real and imagined—right down to agreeing to have the new president sit down to a celebratory postinaugural lunch consisting of dishes that President Lincoln himself enjoyed. This is not a mystic chord of memory. It is branding. But the mood is bigger than the man, and Obama can be no more blamed for succumbing to it, or for trying to turn its symbolism to his own advantage, than Lincoln can be faulted for his own political maneuvering. Our president is hardly the innocent that he tries to appear to be, but it is precisely his intensely political character, the political cunning that lies behind all his “transcendence” of politics, that makes him Lincolnian; and it comes as a great relief from the un-Lincolnian sanctimony that surrounds his image.
An absolute must-read. All 25,000 words of it.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/l9tDR5PyCpfj9nvo1suiX2wNo1_r3_500.jpg)
In the latest issue of the New Republic, my college professor Sean Wilentz seizes on the glut of bicentennial blather to explain “Who Lincoln [Really] Was“—and touches on Obama in the process:
Lincoln may have had his own purposes, like the Almighty, but those purposes always included gaining or maintaining political advantage, often enough by cagey and unexhilarating means. Although he was often unsuccessful, his political cunning was his strength, and not a corrupting weakness. Pure-hearted radicals did not manipulate him into nobility as much as he manipulated them to suit his own political aims—which, as president, were to save the Union and insure that freedom, and not slavery, would prevail in the struggle of the house divided. Unless we understand this, none of Lincoln’s philosophizing, and none of his spare, arresting, and moving rhetoric, makes any sense…
Like any group of able politicians, Obama and his strategists exploited the mood by hyping their Lincoln connections, real and imagined—right down to agreeing to have the new president sit down to a celebratory postinaugural lunch consisting of dishes that President Lincoln himself enjoyed. This is not a mystic chord of memory. It is branding. But the mood is bigger than the man, and Obama can be no more blamed for succumbing to it, or for trying to turn its symbolism to his own advantage, than Lincoln can be faulted for his own political maneuvering. Our president is hardly the innocent that he tries to appear to be, but it is precisely his intensely political character, the political cunning that lies behind all his “transcendence” of politics, that makes him Lincolnian; and it comes as a great relief from the un-Lincolnian sanctimony that surrounds his image.
An absolute must-read. All 25,000 words of it.
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