Obama-Lincoln comparisons favor new guy

In mid-February of 1859, more than 20 months before the election of 1860 that would send him to the White House, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech at a Springfield concert hall.

Newspaper accounts contained in Brown University's online Lincoln Log database, a day-by-day chronology of the life of the 16th president, estimated the size of the crowd as a "handful."

A 4-by-5-foot souvenir map of Springfield published in 1858 highlights "all the notable places and homes in town," said Illinois State Historical Society Director William Furry, who owns a copy. "And there's nothing on it about Lincoln."

He had just turned 50. He hadn't held elective office for nearly 10 years, since finishing his 2-year term in the U.S. House in 1849, and he had failed in two attempts to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

At that time, he compared poorly, at best, to the almost universally beloved historical figure he would become in guiding the nation through the Civil War.

Keep this in mind when you hear variations on the "he's no Lincoln!" criticism that Sen. Barack Obama all but invited Saturday when he put on the metaphorical stovepipe hat in announcing his presidential bid in Springfield more than 20 months before the election of 2008.


At this point in the political cycle 148 years ago, Lincoln was no "Lincoln" either.

"He was a big-time lawyer who was well-known only in the Midwest," said East Carolina University historian Gerald Prokopowicz, author of "Did Lincoln Own Slaves?" an upcoming Vintage book that addresses the most frequently asked questions about Lincoln (the answer to the title question is no, by the way).

"In letters he wrote in 1859, he says he'd rather serve in the Senate than be president and that he didn't think himself fit for the presidency," said Prokopowicz, who has been a reliable font of Lincoln lore for me since we roomed together in college. "Even in early 1860, his name didn't appear on the charts of the dozen or so top Republican prospects for president that year."

But he may have been a stealth candidate all along. Harold Holzer, New York-based author of numerous books on Lincoln and a co-chair of the federal panel overseeing preparations for the bicentennial of Lincoln's 1809 birth, said Lincoln's extensive public-speaking schedule in 1859 and his efforts to publish transcripts of his debates with Senate-campaign foe Stephen A. Douglas suggest he was positioning himself for a White House bid.

"His law partner said that Lincoln's ambition `was a little engine that knew no rest,'" Holzer said.

One can only imagine the indignant lashing that today's fulminating skeptics would have administered to the presumptuous and imperfect former Illinois legislator and Washington short-timer had they been around in 1859 and gotten wind of Lincoln's presidential aspirations.

Lincoln's major "coming out" as a candidate didn't happen until the next year--in late February of 1860--when he delivered a stirring anti-slavery address to the influential Young Men's Republican Union at New York City's Cooper Institute.

Holzer's 2004 book, "Lincoln at Cooper Union," is subtitled "The Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President."

"It was republished and distributed all over in pamphlets," Holzer said. "Three months later, the Republicans nominated him" at their convention in Chicago instead of such early, prohibitive favorites as William Henry Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio.

Of course, as Holzer and the other scholars were quick to point out, presidential campaign seasons were far shorter 150 years ago than they are now. The process didn't require candidates to woo primary voters and raise obscene amounts of cash up front just to be considered viable.

That said, comparing prospects in February 2007 with prospects in February 1859, "Obama is much better situated than Lincoln was," Holzer said.

He's drawing thousands to his speeches, not handfuls. He's on the list of top-tier candidates, not the list of regional curiosities. And like him or not, he's on everyone's map.

Obama may be no Lincoln, but Lincoln was no Obama.

Chicago tribune

Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961; IPA pronunciation: [bəˈɹɑk oʊˈbɑː.mə]) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois. According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, he is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history and the only African American currently serving in the U.S. Senate.[1] He is a candidate for the Democratic Party's 2008 presidential nomination.

He was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996. Four years later, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Obama won reelection to the state senate in 2002, running unopposed. As early as 2002, he was a critic of the proposed Iraq War, declaring in a television interview that he would have voted against the Iraq Resolution.[3] In 2004 he ran for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and became a nationally known political figure. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote.

Obama formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007. Recent opinion polls rank him as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party's nomination, after Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY). (wiki)

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (born in Alego, a village in Nyanza Province, Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). His parents met while both were attending the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student.

When Obama was two years old, his parents separated and later divorced; his father went to Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. studies, eventually returning to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian foreign student, with whom she had one daughter. The family moved to Jakarta, where Obama attended local schools from ages 6 to 10.[8] He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, attending Punahou School from 5th through 12th grade and graduating from there in 1979. His father died in a car accident in Kenya when Obama was 21 years old. Obama's mother died of cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's white, middle class family. His knowledge about his absent black Kenyan father came mainly through family stories and photographs. Of his early childhood, Obama wrote: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind." As a young adult, he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. Obama writes about using marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."

After high school, Obama studied for two years at Occidental College and then transferred to Columbia University, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. After receiving his B.A. degree in 1983, Obama worked for one year at Business International Corporation. In 1985, he moved to Chicago to direct a non-profit project assisting local churches to organize job training programs for residents of poor neighborhoods.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In February 1990, he gained national recognition for becoming the first African American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. He obtained his J.D. degree magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991. On returning to Chicago, Obama directed a voter registration drive, then worked for the civil rights law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. (wiki)

In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate from Chicago's 13th District in the south-side neighborhood of Hyde Park. In January 2003, when Democrats regained control of the chamber, he was named chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. Among his legislative initiatives, Obama helped to author an Illinois Earned Income Tax Credit that provided benefits to lower-income families, worked for legislation that would support residents who could not afford health insurance, and helped pass bills to increase funding for AIDS prevention and care programs.

In 2000, Obama made an unsuccessful Democratic primary run for the U.S. House of Representatives seat held by four-term incumbent candidate Bobby Rush. Rush, a former Black Panther and community activist, charged that Obama had not "been around the first congressional district long enough to really see what's going on." Rush received 61% of the vote to Obama's 30%. After the loss, Obama focused his efforts on the state Senate, authoring a law requiring police to videotape interrogations for crimes punishable by the death penalty. He ran unopposed in 2002.

Reviewing Obama's career in the Illinois Senate, a February 2007 article in the Washington Post noted his ability to work effectively with both Democrats and Republicans, and to build bipartisan coalitions. In his subsequent campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama won the endorsement of the Illinois Fraternal Order of Police, whose officials cited his "longtime support of gun control measures and his willingness to negotiate compromises," despite his support for some bills that the police union had opposed.

Midway through his U.S. Senate campaign, Obama wrote and delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.[28]

After describing his maternal grandfather's experiences as a World War II veteran and a beneficiary of the New Deal's FHA and GI Bill programs, Obama said:

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

Questioning the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War, Obama spoke of an enlisted Marine, Corporal Seamus Ahern from East Moline, Illinois, asking, "Are we serving Seamus as well as he is serving us?" He continued:

When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never, ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.

Finally he spoke for national unity:

The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

The speech was Obama's introduction to most of America. Its enthusiastic reception at the convention and widespread coverage by national media gave him instant celebrity status.