Abraham Lincoln on the More Realistic, Experienced Candidate…
At an Iowa town hall event tonight, Hillary Clinton was asked which president most inspired her. She answered Lincoln:
“And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancor, a little more forgiving and tolerant than might possibly have brought people back together more quickly,” Clinton continued. “But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the reigns of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.”
That comment is straight-up Dunning School, and it naturally set off a lot of alarm bells among liberal journalists. As well it should.
Speaking of Lincoln, political theorist Roy Tsao sent me this quote from a letter Lincoln sent to Charles Wilson in 1858.
The context: Lincoln was running for Senate in Illinois against Stephen Douglas. That campaign was the setting of the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln won the debates, but lost the race. Horace Greeley backed Douglas, much to Lincoln’s chagrin. But in his letter to Wilson, Lincoln tried to damp down speculation that Greeley was corrupt or on the take. No, said Lincoln, what led Greeley to back someone like Douglas over Lincoln, whose opposition to the expansion of slavery was much closer to Greeley’s own position (Greeley wound up supporting Lincoln in 1860), was, well, let’s let Lincoln speak for himself.
It is because he thinks Douglas’ superior position, reputation, experience, and ability, if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure republican position, and therefore, his re-election do the general cause of republicanism, more good, than would the election of any one of our better undistinguished pure republicans.
Sound familiar?