Omar Samhan

If so, then the first two rounds of March Madness may promote more US-Islamic tolerance than all the State Department visits Hillary Clinton can schedule.

Two young men, Ali Farokhmanesh of University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, IA) and Omar Samhan of St. Mary’s College (Moraga, CA), excited the nation’s sports fans over the past weekend with their confident, inspired play. Against the odds, #9-seeded Northern Iowa cancelled #1-seeded Kansas’s ticket to the dance, and #10-seeded St. Mary’s took #2-seeded Villanova out of the chase, with Farokhmanesh and Samhan playing leading roles.

Ali’s father’s first name is Mashallah. Omar’s dad comes from Egypt. Obama’s middle name is Hussein.

Are they Muslims?

Doesn’t matter. They shoot hoops, don’t they? And here in America, sports trumps politics.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

It included this comment:

Personal questions are asked by the census taker, [but] I answer only “2 persons live here”. That is all. I consider that anything more is invasive…In past years we have had census takers in our face, in our house, persuading us to give all sorts of info which we refused. Everything from how much money to how many bathrooms. As I recall, the constitution grants the census only the head count.

Actually, this is incorrect. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution includes:

The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct.

So, what is the current US law? TITLE 13, CHAPTER 5, SUBCHAPTER II, § 141[g] states:

“census of population” means a census of population, housing, and matters relating to population and housing.

Why someone would decline to state how many bathrooms they have is beyond me (unless there’s an armory hidden in a toilet tank, but I think that’s covered in the Second Amendment).

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

—attributed to Josef Stalin in Boris Bazhanov’s
Memoirs of Stalin’s Former Secretary, publ. 1992

*     *     *     *     *

Bev Harris is one of democracy’s watchdogs. She leads Black Box Voting, a non-partisan group that seeks transparent and honest elections. Here’s her unsentimental, hard-facts take on today’s important Senatorial election in Massachusetts.

SHINING A BRIGHT LIGHT ON AN UNDEMOCRATIC TACTIC

For 10 years, I’ve been watching a trend to manipulate elections through premature “call” of the race by a media outlet. See below for predictions on what may follow a media call for either candidate in Massachusetts.

Bev Harris

The media “call” can be manipulated because the public doesn’t know that projected winners come from a system that is not even a governmental source! In fact, the media “calls” elections based on data from just one media outlet — usually a quiet little division of the Associated Press that occupies a little corner somewhere and answers very few questions. Volunteers call in result reports to the corporation. The reports are often inaccurate (see below for examples). The names of these volunteers are not part of the public record. We will never get the list of names for those who will call in the 351 numbers which will result in “calling the election” for Tuesday’s Massachusetts election.

HOW THE MEDIA “CALL” MAY ULTIMATELY CONTROL POLICY

Martha Coakley

Scott Brown

Sixty votes are needed. If Coakley is called and installed, they’ve got the 60. If Brown is called and stalled, they’ve got 59. Either way, the media “call” on Massachusetts is going to be under exceptional political pressure.

No matter where you stand on the controversial healthcare bill, be aware that what you see reported on Election Night is not only not “official” or “final”, but is not even real, and may not even be the numbers written down by poll workers or printed out by the voting machine.

ISSUING FALSE NUMBERS TO THE MEDIA TO CREATE A FALSE “CALL”

In the recent controversial NY-23 race, volunteers in multiple wards called in zeroes instead of votes for Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. There WERE votes, but they called in zero and later said oops. This was not a plausible oops, because the zeroes were not called in randomly for various races, nor did the zeroes spread themselves among different candidates. Doug Hoffman had false zeroes reported while votes were called in for the others. Incorrect figures provided to the media resulted in a margin which appeared thousands of votes larger than it actually was, goading Hoffman to concede prematurely.

In the Florida 2000 presidential election, impossible numbers were provided to the media producing exactly the margin needed to “call” the race for George W. Bush. Minus 16,000 votes were reported for Al Gore, and (not knowing the margin was false), Gore conceded privately to Bush and nearly conceded to the nation.

In New York City’s 2008 presidential primary, more than 50 wards falsely reported “zero” votes for Obama (but not for Hillary), creating a superficially low result on Election Night.

In Maine’s 2009 election, the media reported called-in results for Lewiston and Augusta, two of Maine’s largest cities, for seven ballot questions each with two possible choices (7×2=14 results per city), a total of 28 vote results for the two cities. Not a single one of the 28 results was correct, and eight were off by large margins.

In New England, even preliminary governmental results from each municipality are not compiled for a day or so. Results are typically sent by courier or brought by the police to the secretary of state. The results you see on the news are therefore not government results at all, but results generated by unnamed volunteers (or sometimes paid part timers) working for a corporation.

The media “call game” is a political game that can be played dirty, and in Massachusetts, the media “call” could ultimately control national healthcare policy.

Usually, these premature calls can be unraveled if they are incorrect because elections aren’t certified for several days and winning candidates aren’t installed into office for a month or more. But in Massachusetts, because of the special situation with an imminent vote on a controversial bill combined with a temporary senator, the media call can create an undemocratic mess.

JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE

When the media calls an election based on non-governmental verbal information from unnamed volunteers, it displaces legitimate election procedures. Media volunteers can — and HAVE — issued false numbers in order to get the media to call an election for a candidate. The US Congress can — and HAS — installed new voting members of congress before the votes are counted or the contest is determined.

If a media outlet calls the Massachusetts race based on verbal reports from names that are never disclosed, we need to call this what it is: Journalistic malpractice, and a danger to democracy.

If what you see Tuesday night ain’t right, be prepared to speak up. Or shout loudly. It’s our duty.

Coakley and Brown photos: The Boston Globe

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Today, an email that has been circulating for several months came to me. It included a statement purportedly made by Barack Obama about his relationship to ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich:

“I only saw Rod Blagojevich one time …. And that was in the stands and from a distance at a Chicago Bears Football Game.”

Just like the Keynes quote, it is bogus.

This “Obama” quote (with the words “Football Game” strangely capitalized) is all over the web, usually accompanied by several authentic photographs of the two men together. Like the Obama birth certificate scam, it “proves” that the President is a liar. But not one of the web villains references where, when, or to whom Obama was speaking when he made this statement. And none of the major news agencies mentions this quote in any story about Obama and Blagojevich. Think about this: were it valid, is it conceivable that Fox News would ignore such a statement?

Citizens have a right to disagree. But democracy works when the populace decides based upon truth, not misrepresentation or slander.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Well, that is sad. It seems that making things up has been a major accomplishment of the electronic age. We will probably keep the saying but remove the attribution. This seems to be happening a lot more than it used to. Thanks.

Here’s their updated bumper sticker.

A small victory for truth, justice, and scholarship.

*     *     *     *     *

Update 8/13/09: One month later, the bumper sticker is still being sold online with the attribution.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”

You can find this statement, attributed to economist John Maynard Keynes all over the web. It also appears, somewhat more frequently, in this form:

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.“

In no case, (even in a book about capitalism) is the quotation accompanied by a citation naming its source among Keynes’ many books and lectures. That in itself is not unusual; incomplete attribution is unscholarly, but it is internet SOP. But is either quotation truly from Keynes?

The first version sounds intelligent, but not necessarily Keynesian, and the second reads as if it were written by an illiterate. Since the two are nearly equivalent in their meaning, it is highly unlikely that both of them are from Keynes’ oeuvre. So I queried a number of Keynesian scholars.

Thomas Cate, professor of economics, Northern Kentucky University, specializing in the economics of John Maynard Keynes:
“I do not believe that this quote is by Keynes. It appears to be a re-wording of something said by Adam Smith about the business community.”

J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics, University of California at Berkeley, and former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury:
“I’ve never seen it.”

Alexander Kirby, Associate Professor of American History and Government, University of Wisconsin-Stout:
“Beats me, which is why I’d never use it in a scholarly source.”

Michael S. Lawlor, Professor of Economics, Wake Forest University, co-author of New Perspectives on Keynes (1995):
“The quotation you cite is unfamiliar to me.”

N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics, Harvard University, and former chief of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (he even has a dog named “Keynes”!):
“I don’t know where the quotation comes from.”

Allan Meltzer, University Professor of Political Economy, Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business:
“I read most of Keynes’s published papers. I never saw it.”

Donald E. Moggridge, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto:
“The quotation is fabricated.”

James M. Rock, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Utah:
“I think it is bogus.”

Robert Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick and author of a prize-winning, three-volume biography of Keynes:
“One of the fictions.”

Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business:
“I have never heard of it.”

This is almost certainly one of those cases where someone created an opinion and attached it to a dead person’s name. Gullibility or deviousness carried the fiction onward, and in a while it became gospel.

Except in Wikipedia. This quotation is not included in its Keynes entry.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Compare Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter. Each abandoned his party in order to assure or improve his chance of winning re-election. Pragmatic?  Egomaniacal? Fighting the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way?

Whom do you love?

Lieberman, 67, lifted high by the Democratic party (vice presidential candidate in 2000, winner of the national popular vote with Al Gore), abandoned his party when he lost the 2006 Connecticut primary to challenger Ned Lamont, but won the election when Republicans ditched their own candidate to vote overwhelmingly for Independent Lieberman. He followed this two years later by speaking at the 2008 Republican Convention in support of John McCain. He is officially listed in Senate rolls as an “Independent Democrat” (ID-CT) and is ostensibly part of the Democratic caucus, but is no longer invited to leadership or policy-making meetings. Most had considered Lieberman one of the more “moderate” Democrats in the Senate.

Specter, 79, reading the pollsters’ tea leaves last month, concluded that crossing the aisle too many times had destroyed his chance to win re-election as Pennsylvania’s Republican senator in 2010. He is now a Democrat. Most had considered Specter one of the more “moderate” Republicans in the Senate.

Do you admire one for standing up for what he believes in, while abhorring the self-serving tactics of the other? If so, you are rooting for your team irrespective of behavior. “My party, right or wrong” is no slogan to be proud of.

I have great antipathy for the two-party system. The stability it engenders (compare our “civilized” changing of the guard to Italy’s or Israel’s multi-party chaos) is actually a demonstration of do-little calcification more than it is a platform for improvement. This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue; it is evidence of inertia and stagnation of ideas on both sides. In a previous post, I cited the strict party-line Congressional questioning into baseball pitcher Roger Clemens’ use of steroids (clearly an issue that should be non-partisan) as evidence of how the political parties control the minds of our legislators even when independent thinking would not undermine party platforms. [Note that my prediction in that post was wrong: Pres. Bush did not pardon Clemens as I thought he would.]

Although I have many deep (check that…HUGE) disagreements with the politics of both Lieberman and Specter, I wish they truly were independent and were joined by a dozen more Senators whose independence would be testament to creative and critical thinking.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I say step back and look at what “too big to fail” should have suggested long before the current financial cliff edge was reached: If it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

Capitalism rewards successful innovation and efficiency; saving what has rotted is antithetical. I realize, of course, that by the time AIG was infused, there may have been no choice. GM, on the other hand, may have been DOA. This week, according to The New York Times, auditors expressed “substantial doubt’” about GM’s ability to survive “even if it received all $30 billion it hoped to borrow from the federal government.”

The past is past; I am now talking prospectively.

Corporations, sine qua nons of capitalism, reward their stockholders and employees though policies that seek growth and accumulation of profit. Although we have anti-trust laws to prevent over-concentration of corporate power, “free market” advocates abhor governmental intervention, and in recent years, they have gutted regulation.

But there are benefits to splitting up behemoths. Our communication system was actually improved, and innovation was spurred, when in 1984 AT&T was forced to split into seven independent companies.

A corporate monster will not voluntarily watch its weight. Keeping the leviathan from selfishly overeating and destroying the loch is our government’s job.

*     *     *     *     *

3/16/09 follow up:  A shorter version of the above appeared in print today as a San Francisco Chronicle letter to the editor.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Link to original article.

Lincoln’s Contested Legacy

Great Emancipator or unreconstructed racist? Defender of civil liberties or subverter of the Constitution? Each generation evokes a different Lincoln. But who was he?

By Philip B. Kunhardt III

From the time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 12, 2009, there has never been a decade in which Abraham Lincoln’s influence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln’s legacy has shifted again and again as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers-all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln. He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance Movement; invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used to justify support for and against incursions on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false friend to African-Americans. Was he at heart a “progressive man” whose death was an “unspeakable calamity” for African-Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he “the embodiment…of the American Tradition of racism,” as African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book?

Frederick Douglass

Not everyone agreed. Northern Democrats had been deeply opposed to Lincoln’s wartime suspension of habeas corpus, which led to the imprisonment without trial of thousands of suspected traitors and war protesters. Though Lincoln had taken care to proceed constitutionally and with restraint, his opponents decried his “tyrannical” rule. But in the wake of the assassination even his critics were silent.

Across much of the South, of course, Lincoln was hated, even in death. Though Robert E. Lee and many Southerners expressed regret over the murder, others saw it as an act of Providence, and cast John Wilkes Booth as the bold slayer of an American tyrant. “All honor to J. Wilkes Booth,” wrote Southern diarist Kate Stone (referring as well to the simultaneous, though not fatal, attack on Secretary of State William Seward): “What torrents of blood Lincoln has caused to flow, and how Seward has aided him in his bloody work. I cannot be sorry for their fate. They deserve it. They have reaped their just reward.”

William H. Seward

For their part, African-Americans’ pangs of loss were tinged with fear for their future. Few promoted Lincoln’s legacy more passionately than critic-turned-admirer Frederick Douglass, whose frustration at the presidency of Andrew Johnson kept growing. Lincoln was “a progressive man, a human man, an honorable man, and at heart an antislavery man,” Douglass wrote in December 1865. “I assume…had Abraham Lincoln been spared to see this day, the negro of the South would have had more hope of enfranchisement.” Ten years later, at the dedication of the Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., Douglass seemed to recant these words, calling Lincoln “preeminently the white man’s President” and American blacks “at best only his step-children.” But Douglass’ purpose that day was to puncture the sentimentality of the occasion and to criticize the government’s abandonment of Reconstruction. And in the final decades of his long life Douglass repeatedly invoked Lincoln as having embodied the spirit of racial progress.

Douglass’ worries about America proved prophetic. By the 1890s, with the failure of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow, Lincoln’s legacy of emancipation lay in ruins. Regional reconciliation-the healing of the rift between North and South-had supplanted the nation’s commitment to civil rights. In 1895, at a gathering of Union and Confederate soldiers in Chicago, the topics of slavery and race were set aside in favor of a focus on North-South reconciliation. As the 1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth approached, race relations in the country were reaching a nadir.

In August 1908, riots broke out in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, after a white woman, Mabel Hallam, claimed she had been raped by a local black man, George Richardson. (She later admitted to making up the story.) On Friday, August 14, two thousand white men and boys began to attack African-Americans and set fire to black businesses. “Lincoln freed you,” rioters were heard to yell. “We’ll show you where you belong.” The next night, the mob approached the shop of William Donnegan, a 79-year-old African-American shoemaker who had made boots for Lincoln and at whose brother’s barbershop Lincoln used to mingle with African-Americans. Setting fire to Donnegan’s shop, the mob dragged the old man outside and pelted him with bricks, then slashed his throat. Still alive, he was dragged across the street into a school courtyard. There, not far from a statue of Abraham Lincoln, he was hoisted up a tree and left to die.

W.E.B. Du Bois

The centennial of Lincoln’s birth marked the largest commemoration of any person in American history. The Lincoln penny was minted, the first coin bearing the image of an American president, and talks took place in Washington about a grand Lincoln monument to be erected in the nation’s capital. All across the country, and in many nations around the world, America’s 16th president was extolled. An editorial in the London Times declared, “Together with Washington, Lincoln occupies a pinnacle to which no third person is likely to attain.” The commander of the Brazilian Navy ordered a 21-gun salute “in homage to the memory of that noble martyr of moral and of neighborly love.” The former states of the Confederacy, which less than 50 years earlier had rejoiced at Lincoln’s death, now paid tribute to the leader who had reunified the nation. W. C. Calland, a state official in Missouri-which, during the Civil War, had been a border state that contributed 40,000 troops to the Confederate cause-barely contained his astonishment in a memorandum reporting on the festivities: “Perhaps no event could have gathered around it so much of patriotic sentiment in the South as the birthday of Abraham Lincoln….Confederate veterans held public services and gave public expression to the sentiment, that had ‘Lincoln lived’ the days of reconstruction might have been softened and the era of good feeling ushered in earlier.”

In most of America the celebrations were thoroughly segregated, including in Springfield, where blacks (with the exception of a declined invitation to Booker T. Washington) were excluded from a dazzling gala dinner. As the Chicago Tribune reported, it “is to be a lily white affair from start to finish.” Across town, inside one of Springfield’s most prominent black churches, African-Americans met for their own celebration. “We colored people love and revere the memory of Lincoln,” said the Rev. L. H. Magee. “His name is a synonym for the freedom of wife, husband and children, and a chance to live in a free country, fearless of the slave-catcher and his bloodhounds.” Referring to the “sacred dust of the great emancipator” lying in Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, Magee called upon black people across America to make pilgrimages to Lincoln’s tomb. And he cast his gaze forward a hundred years-to the bicentennial of 2009-and envisioned a Lincoln celebration “by the great-grandchildren of those who celebrate this centenary.” In that far-off year, Magee predicted, “prejudice shall have been banished as a myth and relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ”

Theodore Roosevelt

Seven thousand people showed up for the dedication, including a number of African-Americans, who mixed in among the others with no thought of separation. When Roosevelt began his speech he hopped onto a chair and was greeted by cheers. “As the years [roll] by,” he said in his crisp, excitable voice, “…this whole Nation will grow to feel a peculiar sense of pride in the mightiest of the mighty men who mastered the mighty days; the lover of his country and of all mankind; the man whose blood was shed for the union of his people and for the freedom of a race: Abraham Lincoln.” The ceremony in Kentucky heralded the possibility of national reconciliation and racial justice proceeding hand in hand. But that was not to be, as the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 13 years later would make all too clear.

Members of the Lincoln Memorial commission-created by Congress in 1911-saw the monument not only as a tribute to the 16th president but also as a symbol of a reunified nation. With Northerners and Southerners having fought side by side in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and again in World War I, it was time, they felt, to put aside sectional differences once and for all. This meant that the Lincoln honored on the National Mall must not be the man who had broken the South militarily or had crushed the institution of slavery but the preserver of the Union. “By emphasizing his saving the Union you appeal to both sections,” wrote Royal Cortissoz, author of the inscription that would be etched inside the finished building behind Daniel Chester French’s nearly 20-foot-tall sculpture of the seated Lincoln. “By saying nothing about slavery you avoid the rubbing of old sores.”

Robert Russa Moton

In the days that followed, Moton’s speech went almost entirely unreported. Even his name was dropped from the record-in most accounts Moton was referred to simply as “a representative of the race.” African-Americans across the country were outraged. The Chicago Defender, an African-American weekly, urged a boycott of the Lincoln Memorial until it was properly dedicated to the real Lincoln. Not long afterward, at a large gathering in front of the monument, Bishop E.D.W. Jones, an African-American religious leader, insisted that “the immortality of the great emancipator lay not in his preservation of the Union, but in his giving freedom to the negroes of America.”

Marian Anderson at Lincoln Memorial April 9, 1939

In 1957, a 28-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. came to the Lincoln Memorial to help lead a protest for black voting rights. “The spirit of Lincoln still lives,” he had proclaimed before the protest. Six years later, in 1963, he returned for the March on Washington. The August day was bright and sunny, and more than 200,000 people, black and white, converged on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. King’s speech called Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation “a beacon of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been scarred in the flame of withering injustice.” But it was not enough, he went on, simply to glorify the past. “One hundred years later we must face the tragic fact the Negro is still not free….is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chain of discrimination.” And then he told the enraptured crowd, “I have a dream.” Author and New York Times book critic Richard Bernstein later called King’s words “the single most important piece of American oratory since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”

JFK funeral procession

To address a profound need for national healing and unity, JFK’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy-in consultation with other family members and official planners-decided to model her slain husband’s funeral upon Lincoln’s. The president’s casket was laid in state inside the White House East Room, and was later taken to the Great Rotunda of the Capitol and rested upon the catafalque used at Lincoln’s funeral. On their final procession to Arlington National Cemetery, the funeral cars passed reverently by the Lincoln Memorial. One of the most poignant images from that era was a political cartoon drawn by Bill Mauldin, depicting the statue of Lincoln bent over in grief.

Malcolm X

In particular, the Nixon administration’s perceived abuse of executive power during the Vietnam War prompted unflattering comparisons with Lincoln’s wartime measures. Some scholars, however, rejected such comparisons, noting that Lincoln reluctantly did what he thought necessary to preserve the Constitution and the nation. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for one, wrote in 1973 that since the Vietnam War didn’t rise to the same level of national crisis, Nixon “has sought to establish as a normal Presidential power what previous Presidents had regarded as power justified only by extreme emergencies. . . . He does not, like Lincoln, confess to doubt about the legality of his course.”

Decades later, another war would again bring Lincoln’s legacy to the fore. Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush addressed Congress with words evocative of Lincoln’s comments at the outset of the Civil War: “The course of this conflict is not known,” Bush said, “yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” As in the Vietnam era, subsequent controversies over the White House’s conduct of the war on terror-such as the use of secret wiretapping and the detention of “enemy combatants” without trial-provoked another round of debates over presidential powers and the precedents created by Lincoln.

Despite such lingering controversies, Lincoln has consistently polled as one of the three greatest U.S. presidents, along with George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And though many African-Americans lost their veneration for him over the decades, recent statements by President Barack Obama and others suggest renewed appreciation. It was black Americans, after all, who refused to give up on Lincoln’s emancipationist legacy even when American whites wanted to forget it. And if Lincoln shared in the racial prejudice of his day, it is also true that his outlook grew significantly over the years of his presidency. He was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely,” Frederick Douglass wrote, “who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.”

And yet, as Bennett and others have rightly insisted, the Lincoln of earlier generations of blacks was also in part a mythic figure-his own racial prejudices passed over too lightly, even as African-Americans’ roles in emancipation were underemphasized. In a series of 1922 editorials for the NAACP journal the Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois stressed the importance of taking Lincoln off his pedestal in order to place attention on the need for ongoing progress. But Du Bois refused to reject Lincoln in the process. “The scars and foibles and contradictions of the Great do not diminish but enhance the worth and meaning of their upward struggle,” he wrote. Of all the great figures of the 19th century, “Lincoln is to me the most human and lovable. And I love him not because he was perfect but because he was not and yet triumphed.” In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, Obama said much the same thing: “I am fully aware of his limited views on race. But…[in] the midst of slavery’s dark storm and the complexities of governing a house divided, he somehow kept his moral compass pointed firm and true.”

Lincoln will always remain the president who helped destroy slavery and preserved the Union. With stubbornness, caution and an exquisite sense of timing, he engaged almost physically with unfolding history. Derided by some as an opportunist, he was in fact an artist, responding to events as he himself changed over time, allowing himself to grow into a true reformer. Misjudged as a mere jokester, incompetent, unserious, he was in fact the most serious actor on the political stage. He was politically shrewd, and he took a long view of history. And he knew when to strike to obtain his ends. Just for his work on behalf of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, he has earned a permanent place in the history of human freedom.

In addition, he was a man of patience who refused to demonize others; a person of the middle who could build bridges across chasms. Herein may lie one of his most important legacies-his unwavering desire to reunite the American people. In Chicago’s Grant Park, the night he was declared the winner of the 2008 election, Obama sought to capture that sentiment, quoting from Lincoln’s first inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends…. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

And with the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president, we remember that, in 1864, with the Union war effort going badly, the national government might have been tempted to suspend the upcoming elections. Not only did Lincoln insist they take place, he staked his campaign on a controversial platform calling for the 13th Amendment, willing to risk everything on its behalf. When he went on to an overwhelming victory in November, he obtained a mandate to carry through his program. “[I]f the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election,” he spoke to a gathered crowd from a White House window, “it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us….[The election] has demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war.”

Around the world, governments routinely suspend elections, citing the justification of a “national emergency.” Yet Lincoln set a precedent that would guarantee the voting rights of the American people through subsequent wars and economic depressions. Though our understanding of him is more nuanced than it once was, and we are more able to recognize his limitations as well as his strengths, Abraham Lincoln remains the great example of democratic leadership-by most criteria, truly our greatest president.

Philip B. Kunhardt III is co-author of the 2008 book Looking for Lincoln and a Bard Center Fellow.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a different shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught

The converse is also true: you have to be carefully taught to be color-blind. Witness this exchange between one of my daughters and her almost-four-year-old son:

Mother: Do you remember when we were in the grocery store and you asked me why some people have darker skin than we do?

Child: Yes. And some people have lighter skin!

Mother: Yes! Do you remember that I told you that is because it is important to have variety…to have all sorts of different people, because if we were all the same life would be boring?

Child: Yes! And some people have red hair. Like Jonah at school.

Mother: Yes. Well, a long time ago—well, long ago in your life—there were people in the United States and around the world who didn’t like all that variety. They thought that people with different skin color shouldn’t be treated as nicely as they were.

Child: That’s terrible, Mommy.

Mother: Yes, it was terrible. But there were a lot of people who knew that variety was a very good thing. And there was a man named Martin Luther King, Jr., who talked to the people of the United States about how important it is to have variety and to share the United States with everyone, no matter how light or dark their skin is. He was a very good man.

Child: Where is the King man now?

Mother: Well, buddy, Martin Luther King is no longer alive.

Child: He’s DEAD? Oh nooooooo…

Mother: Yes he is, bud, but we have a holiday every year to celebrate his life and all the good things he did.

Child: That’s good. But I’m sad he’s dead, Mommy.

Mother: Me too, buddy.

Child: When will *I* be dead?

Mother: Not for a very very long time.

Child: That’s good!

Mother: Yes, yes it is! I like having you around.

Diversity.

Tolerance.

It took more than two centuries, but at last we have variety in the White House.

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(Full disclosure:  I sang the part of Luther Billis in South Pacific at Harvard in 1965.  The Harvard Crimson play was panned, but I got a good notice. The review is online.)

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.