A year ago, on this blog I have been so privileged to participate in, I posted an entry posing the question, ‘Wouldn’t Abraham Lincoln be proud today?’ Now, on this February 12, 2009, the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, we can say that, indeed, he would.
If Lincoln could return to visit us, what he would find most surprising about Barack Obama’s election to the highest office in the land would most likely be the capital ‘D’ next to his name. In Lincoln’s day, ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ meant something very different from what they do today. The G.O.P. was initially sparked and founded by the anti-slavery movement, as many amateur political historian readers will be aware. It was long after Lincoln was called ‘Home’, precipitated by an assassin’s bullet, that the Democratic Party came to represent the down-trodden and others who in so many ways have been marginalized, disadvantaged or neglected by the larger society. Yet, on this date in 1809, the nation's first Republican president was born to, let's face it, a poor family in a backwoods Kentucky log cabin.
In all fairness to history, Lincoln might also be initially shocked by Barack Obama’s skin color as a President of the United States. Lincoln was, after all, a man of his time. At the outset of the Civil War, his prime objective was to hold the Union together. Only later, amid all the fraternal bloodletting of that conflict did he see the fundamental need to take his country to a higher place and emancipate the slaves throughout the land. But, it wouldn’t take sharp-minded Lincoln long to convert that shock into amazed delight. I would add that it might also, in his case, give him a sense of great humility that his own quest to create a more perfect union could result in a man who would have been held in chains in the Confederacy now occupying the seat of the leader of the United States of America that Lincoln saved. In fact, I contend that it is in that very humility combined with an extraordinary compassion cited by those who knew him and can be seen so clearly in the face that stares back at us from the portrait photos we have of Lincoln that the true greatness of ‘Honest Abe’ lies.
As a supporter of Barack Obama before the Iowa caucuses and even before he took to the same steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois to declare his candidacy for President of the United States where Lincoln began his own long journey to the White House, I feel honored to be a witness to the service of a President Obama during our historic time we all share today.
Abraham Lincoln would be proud of his country today, yet, at the same time, humbled by his own significant role in charting its course to come closer to fulfilling the promises contained in the creed put to paper by the Founding Fathers. Furthermore, like President Obama is now from the same office Lincoln held nearly 150 years ago, he would be well aware of the many great tasks, unfinished and yet-to-be-begun, that lie ahead.
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