It's becoming a cliche to liken Obama to Lincoln. I do it myself. Today on the Brian Lehrer show on public radio in New York, Adam Gopnik did it. Well I've been reading Lincoln, and also reading Yale scholar David Bromwich's piece in Raritan, 2001, on "Lincoln's Constitutional Necessity," about how Lincoln broke the slave-power. The piece is not online, but in it Bromwich states that Lincoln was a relative newcomer–like Obama– and "a man of ostensibly moderate political complexion" whose personal "humiliations" gave him the ability to build a political majority in ways that fanatical abolitionists, who had an "incapacity for common feeling," could never do. The conclusion: "He is a member of a party of resistance but so humanized, so general in his sympathies at last, that he can serve as the animating power for a triumph of charity over the human obstacles in its path." Wow. Stirring.
A party of resistance. I feel myself a member of it today. And my president-elect has experienced humiliation, that vital element of Lincoln's efficacy. I emailed Bromwich about the comparison. He wrote:
We are all trying to figure out what his center-right cabinet choices amount to. Lincoln's team of rivals after all was a team in clear accord with the political positions he took in 1859 and 1860. Obama is up to something different–appeasing the political establishment to the top of his bent, but with choices who, if they stay what they were and he stays what he was, he must either fire or bend himself to accommodate. The complete absence of persons who
opposed the Iraq war from the start is really mystifying; as if Lincoln had decided that the public declaration of abolitionist views was a disqualification for service in his cabinet.
I find this very clarifying. Mr. Obama, please respond.
