Back when the Democratic primaries and caucuses were going hot and heavy, I joked that Sen. Hillary Clinton had an excellent argument that she never exploited: “The last time this country elected an inexperienced but eloquent lawyer from Illinois, we got a Civil War.”
Obama did make an implicit comparison when he announced his candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007, at the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Ill., almost on Lincoln’s birthday and at the spot where Lincoln delivered his “house divided” speech.
Certainly there are many differences, such as education: Obama is a graduate of Columbia and Harvard, whereas Lincoln had less than a year of formal schooling.
But consider their political resumes before their elections to the presidency. Both candidates became national figures on account of their oratory (Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and Lincoln for his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, followed by his Cooper Union speech in early 1860).
Lincoln had no executive experience, unless you count running a village store or a small law practice. He lost his first race for the state legislature in 1832, but came back in 1834 to win the first of four consecutive two-year terms in the Illinois House. He served one term in Congress from 1847 to 1849. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1858, but was defeated.
Obama also lacks executive experience. He was elected to the Illinois legislature three times. He lost the primary in a run for the U.S. House in 2000, but was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004.
When Lincoln took the oath of office in 1861, he was 52 years old and the third-youngest president to be elected in U.S. history. Obama is 47, pretty young for a president (it comes as something of a shock to me to realize that the next president will be younger than I am), but he is still older than U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton when they took office.
On their way to their party nominations, Lincoln’s major rival was a senator from New York, William M. Seward. Obama’s main rival was also a senator from New York.
During the presidential campaign, Obama was criticized for preferring set-piece speeches to impromptu statements. Lincoln shared that preference. He arrived in Gettysburg, Pa., the afternoon before his famous prepared speech. An army band serenaded the house where he was dining, and the crowd called for him to respond. He told them that he had nothing prepared for them, and “in my position, it is somewhat important that I should not say foolish things.”
“If you can help it,” shouted someone in the crowd.
“It very often happens,” Lincoln replied, “that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”
As biographer David Donald explained, Lincoln was “never happy at extemporaneous speaking,” but excelled at prepared speeches, such as his Gettysburg Address the next day.
In the campaign of 2008, Obama did best in the Northeast, the Great Lakes states, and the West. Those were the same areas where Lincoln won, too — although he had no chance in the South, since his name wasn’t even on the ballot in those states.
There were rumors that Obama was born in Kenya, and that Lincoln was not the son of Thomas Lincoln, but the bastard child of an Abraham Enlow.
But there’s one major difference: No state has threatened to secede on account of Obama’s election, at least not yet. Then again, one might note that erstwhile secessionist Todd Palin did play a minor role in the 2008 election.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a frequent contributor to The Post.
