CT Blue

Garry Wills is one of my favorite writers. In the most recent New York Review of Books he makes the case that the best comparison to Obama’s recent speech on race is to Lincoln’s Cooper Union Speech, not to JFK’s speech on religion or FDR’s First Inaugural. Wills points out that both men faced similar challenges:

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? Each decided to address them 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.

The article must be read in full. Wills makes the point that both men successfully distanced themselves, in principled fashion, from the excesses of those with whom they were, in many ways, in fundamental agreement. Wills is too good a writer, and the points he makes are too nuanced to lend themselves to easy synopsis, but his concluding paragraphs make his overall point well:

Lincoln faced a greater challenge— the threat of national disintegration— and he had to make commensurately greater concessions, like granting the South its claim to constitutional protection of slavery. The extremist in his attic, John Brown, had not only spoken wild words but taken up weapons and killed men. Lincoln was under strong pressures to trash Brown, but he knew this would serve no useful purpose.

In his prose, Obama of necessity lagged far behind the resplendent Lincoln. But what is of lasting interest is their similar strategy for meeting the charge of extremism. Both argued against the politics of fear. Neither denied the darker aspects of our history, yet they held out hope for what Lincoln called here the better “lights of current experience”—what he would later call the “better angels of our nature.” Each looked for larger patterns under the surface bitternesses of their day. Each forged a moral position that rose above the occasions for their speaking.

Wouldn’t it be nice to once again have a president who can cope with complexity, both internally and in the way s/he communicates with the American people. Obama took the chance of treating the American people like intelligent people who could transcend sloganeering. It actually appears to have worked, at least partly. Maybe there really is hope.