Obama has said that his role model is Abe Lincoln. Good.
In the weeks after the 1860 presidential election, which Lincoln won with only 40 percent of the vote, on a platform against the extension of slavery, politicians worked to try to make a compromise to keep the slaveholding south happy. The compromise would have barred slavery above the line of the Arkansas-Missouri border but preserved it forever below. Lincoln was against it. He would compromise on the Fugitive Slave law and slavery in Washington, D.C., but he was against further expansion of slavery west for a simple reason. Because it was "wrong."
In then-confidential letters from the west–Springfield, Illinois–to the fledgling New York Times and to leading politicians, Lincoln stopped the compromise with the firmest language: that the work of 10 years of mainstream political opposition to slavery's expansion would be lost.
"Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery…Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter," he wrote to a senator on December 10. And then the next day to another ally: "The tug has to come & better now than later."
The two-state solution is today in play in the same way as the slavery compromise. Obama won on a two-state-solution platform. It was a lot of hard work and bitter compromise, but when McCain lost, so did the one-state, one-Jerusalem, neoconservative, Land of Israel crowd. The two-state solution is itself a kind of apartheid–Arabs over here, Jews over here–but at least the Arabs get something. Just as Lincoln was willing to compromise and allow slavery to persist across the south.
These days the two-state solution is being tested. Israel's slaughter policy in Gaza shows that it will continue to seek violent exclusivist answers to a territorial dispute, and even hints at ethnic cleansing, as Steve Walt says in the post below, as Saif Ammous told me yesterday. Where is the U.S. interest? Where is Obama? Is he working from Hawaii to stop Israel's aggression and preserve the two-state solution? Will he talk to his sectional base, from the progressive left to Chuck Hagel and J Street in the center to Rahm Emanuel, and come out against the Israeli actions?
The tug has to come, & better now than later.
