In the May 1st issue of the New York Review of Books, historian Garry Wills compares the strategies of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama in overcoming the considerable level of prejudice against them.
In this brilliant and most timely essay Willis TWO SPEECHES ON RACE concludes that " Both Obama and Lincoln argued against the politics of fear. Neither denied the darker aspects of our history, yet they held out hope for what Lincoln called the better 'lights of current experience' ... Each looked for larger patterns under the surface bitternesses of their day... and Each forged a moral position that rose above the occasions for their speaking."
Excerpt: " Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his.
Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level ~ two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party's nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation ~ Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war ~ Lincoln against President Polk's Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush's Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.
The most damaging charge against each was an alleged connection with unpatriotic and potentially violent radicals. Lincoln's was the abolutionist John Brown and Obama's is the Rev Jeremiah Wright . Each decided to address these charges openly in a prominent national venue, well before their parties' nominating conventions ~ Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York, Obama at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia."
( My thanks to Mark Jensen for sending me this article )
Allen L Roland http://blogs.salon.com/0002255/2008/04/29.html
TWO SPEECHES ON RACE
By Garry Wills
New York Review of Books
May 1, 2008
Pages 4, 6, & 8
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21290
Of the two speeches discussed here, Senator Barack Obama's speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, is available at http://www.barackobama.com and Abraham Lincoln's at the Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, is available at http://showcase.netins.net.
Neither man fit the conventions of a statesman in his era. Lincoln, thin, gangling, and unkempt, was considered a backwoods rube, born in the frontier conditions of Kentucky, estranged from his father, limited to a catch-as-catch-can education. He was better known as a prairie raconteur than as a legal theorist or prose stylist. Obama, of mixed race and foreign upbringing, had barely known his father, and looked suspiciously "different."
The most damaging charge against each was an alleged connection with unpatriotic and potentially violent radicals. Lincoln's Republican Party was accused of supporting abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who burned the Constitution, or John Brown, who took arms against United States troops, or those who rejected the Supreme Court because of its Dred Scott decision. Obama was suspected of Muslim associations and of following the teachings of an inflammatory preacher who damned the United States. How to face such charges?
Read on here ~ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21290
