Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Okay, a pretty large majority of us agrees that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. And, yes, Donald Trump could be assumed to be the presumptive nominee of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Quelle horreur!

Well, yes, and no. Lincoln, the famous man of “peculiar ambition,” is definitely a founding father of the nation we know. But if this great were us (and not primarily memorialized upon monuments, on sacred native land, on our $5 bill) here’s what we may be talking about in the fuller context of Honest Abe.

“[Lincoln] advanced the country toward unlimited government … He was willing to use foreigners and minority groups against his own people. He was willing to have a selective ‘democratic’ conscience when it came to subjects like deportations.
                                                  – Sam Dixon, Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1986

Then there is this from historian Richard J. Carwardine in “Lincoln: Profiles in Power”

“Lincoln himself composed a few articles specifically for the newspapers and gave careful thought to where his public letters should first appear before they were copied Union-wide. He controlled the press’s access to his private meetings, allocated lucrative government printing contracts to selected Republican papers, and rewarded loyal editors and correspondents with well-paid jobs at home and abroad. Unsurprisingly, loyal correspondents made up the presidential trainload to Gettysburg in November 1863, their place on the platform assured; hundreds of local papers subsequently printed and celebrated Lincoln’s speech, in repudiation of Democratic ridicule of a ”silly, flat and dish-watery utterance’. Probably most important of all, Lincoln, though not dependably accessible to reporters, made sure his door was open when it needed to be.”

None of this is to excuse the hard reporting that should go into the suitability of Donald Trump’s bid for higher office. My two cents? There just might be something to learn in just what are some of the common traits (granted, hopefully a narrow sliver of a Venn diagram) of the current Republican presidential front-runner and Lincoln himself, a man who reasonable people have convinced us to use as a cudgel against Trump – rather than doing the harder work of knocking him down on matters of policy, most damagingly, his penchant for inciting hatred and violence, ie, a proposed ban on all Muslims from visiting America and the advocated killing of terrorists’ families.

Next: Running for Your Life: Running and the C-Word