Today is the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
There are all sorts of things that will be brought up about Lincoln today:
His racism, His evolution into a President, His greatness, His weakness, His foolishness, etc.
And of course he will be compared with Obama, or rather Obama will be compared to him.
People in America simply can't figure out what the heck Obama is doing with this non-partisan thing, nor why he won't attack the old Bush administration, some on the right are beginning to see him as weak. He is black after all and their old ways are hard to control.
But what we need to remember is that he has studied the master manipulator of the country's entire history, Abraham Lincoln. Many of Lincoln's contemporaries thought Lincoln was a weak, not very bright, fool. They treated him as such, as well.
Lincoln's Cabinet of equals had a lot of contempt for the man.
The commander of all of the Union Armies General McClellan, as a prime example, called Lincoln a fool in public many times.
"McClellan's arrogance exceeded his manners. Count Adam Gurowski recorded an entry in November 1861: "Officers of McClellan's staff tell that Mr. Lincoln almost daily comes into McClellan's library, and sits there rather unnoticed. On several occasions McClellan let the President wait in the room, together with other common mortals." Julia Taft recalled an occasion when President Lincoln, his son Willie and Julia's brother Bud had been at McClellan's headquarters waiting for the general. When McClellan arrived, an orderly said: "The President is in the parlor waiting for you, general." Instead of entering the parlor, McClellan marched upstairs, took off his boots and laid down on his bed. After waiting for McClellan to come back downstairs, the President announced, "Come, boys, let us go home."
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=123&subjectID=4
Primary sources: Adam Gurowski, Diary of Adam Gurowski, p. 123, and Julia Taft Bayne, Tad Lincoln's Father, p. 87-88
Asked about McClellan's arrogance and snubs Lincoln said, "We fight with the tools we have."
The current Republican leadership and the party's fellow travelers best read about their own honoured Republican President. Lincoln would do anything to save the Union. Obama has taken him as his mentor.
7 comments:
McClellan was a little different.
He was an excellent organizer and built a fine army. Lincoln said
if McClellan isn't going to use it,
may I borrow it for awhile. Lee thought McClellan the best general he faced and Grant, when asked to assess 'Little Mac', observed he was one of the mysteries of the war. His troops lived him. He was an enigma. Lincoln, like Truman, could not tolerate the military setting national policy. To Lincoln's frustration (and credit) McClellan was the first of several commanders disaster and were
cashiered by Old Abe....
McClellan of course was know as the "Little Nepolean". The size of this kind of ego is sometimes easy to move around, being full of gas and all, that they are so light. I can't help but watch the Republican Leadership and the Cable Network pundits and think that their egos are in the way of their understanding of what is going on.
Obama, as Lincoln, has a focus not shared by his comtemporaries.
This is an interesting take on the whole Obama/Lincoln thing I hadn't considered.
It is an interesting possibility isn't it.
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As far as Obama's current strategies, never have so many agreed so little on so much. No one seems to understand why Obama is doing anything the way he is doing it but they feel compelled to explain it to us anyway.
It is sort of the same with all of the books about Lincoln. In the over 50,000 (+ or -) books on Lincoln published you can find about 60,000 different Lincolns.
Good for you BBC, self sufficiency is such a good trait. I was unemployed (w/no benifits) in the 1974 reccession for 18 months.
People keep talking about past recessions, I have no idea what they are talking about because I breezed right through them.
The years they talk about were good years for me and I was always employed.
But then I was a popular master mechanic and in recessions people get rigs fixed instead of buying new ones, generally speaking.
I've never been unemployed long, except by choice, just luck I guess.
Since moving here, after moving here to be what I call a bum I've learned to get by on very little, if things keep going to hell I can get by on just a few hundred a month and be okay with it.
Sure I will have to give some things up, but I can be okay with that as long as I have a roof over my head and some food in my gut.
My place is free and clear so it's pretty much a given that I have a roof over my head for the rest of my days here.
Lacking that, I also have a pickup camper and a camp trailer, that's more than many have.
It doesn't take me much to be okay with where I live, or I would paint these walls but I just moved in after gutting the place out and redoing it.
My brain doesn't spend much time looking at or caring about the color of the walls.
I have three children in their 20s and 30's who have had a devil of a time.
My kids are in their forty's and have all kinds of problems. Why? Because they are idiots and didn't listen to me.
BBC, Here is how this time is different. You can identify perhaps with this. My nephew is a master mechanic for Toyota (or what ever they call their number one guys) in Colorado. They are losing business daily, kind of like the bottom dropping out of a bucket. He is still working because he is high up the food chain. Hell it is so bad that people are bring their Lexus-es in to be fixed by a Toyota mechanic.
Also I've traveled I-70, I-80, and I-40 to West coast and back twice since August. Half of the trucks are gone. I have NEVER seen that.
I-40 is normally a conveyor belt of trucks. Commerce is not in the doldrums it is at a trickle.
I can see you're in good shape. Me too. But much of America has lost access to the dreams that made us what we were. What shall we become? We may not need to approach this with compassion but surely with empathy.
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