Abe's 200 !

I'll be brief: how appropriate that Obama got to celebrate the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial as President of the United States.

NYT has a great little historical analogy for Abe and Barack

And it made me remember a fantastic piece about where President Obama gets some of his influences for his great speeches and oratory manner.

A while back before Obama was sworn in, I began to think critically about a question: was Obama more of a Lincoln-type persona, or an authoritative FDR-type persona. The easy answer would be Lincoln, since Obama reads more about him and comes from the same state, but a lot of his decision-making in his early days has mirrored that of Franklin Roosevelt. And I don't mean that the country is in a quasi-depression and Obama has to rescue all of us. Those were far different times, and a lot more extraordinary, to me at least. I'm talking about the similar context in which Obama is operating, and the decisions he has to stay true to. The principle of FDR's presidency was that he had to spend money America didn't have in order to get people back to work. As it stands now, Obama is committing $789 billion to invest back into America's infrastructure and programs to have a ripple effect and cause people to apply for credit, buy mortgages, and pay bills.

I can't accurately answer that larger question, but it seems to me that what we are witnessing is a President that has people around him that will come to him and say, "look, this is what was done in the past, and it will work now." The whole reason for celebrating the 200th birthday of a dead President is not to paint the current office-holder as a second-coming, but to acknowledge that a lot of what was done in the past can still be, and will be, applied to our current struggle as a country to dig itself out of a very, very, large hole.

Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his personal journal upon returning from the Soviet Union in 1982, about how different the two societies were when it came to how they viewed their predecessors. He said, "We must respect the dignity of the past, as we must hope that our descendants will respect our own dignity. That Trotsky was subsequently considered an enemy of the state is no reason to deny the reality of his role in the Revolution. History is not a myth to be manipulated in the interests of one or another ruling class. History is a debt of honor we owe to the past."

Both Lincoln and FDR had very dark moments as President. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus in the interest of healing the wounds of the War Between the States. Roosevelt made the single biggest government budget (for the times), and it was so big, it was close to Socialism. And his New York brethren hated him for it.

It is through that even-handed humility that the successes, and errors, of Obama's predecessors must be appropriately applied to the present, not out of obligation but out of honor and respect.