The next president from the land of Lincoln

Wilhelm

Jefferson and Washington gave us the Declaration of Independence.

Lincoln gave us the Gettysburg address.

And Barak Obimbo gave us '' Yes we can '' from the High School Musical film. Ho Hum.

CCTV

Lincoln had a civil war...maybe Obama will avoid one by imposing import controls to protect American jobs ?

mitch

I think his whole presidency ill be a disaster,too many stupid pie in the sky ideas based on wishful thinking.

David

I kind of like the idea that Obama is almost the culmination of history set in motion by the election of Lincoln.

Verity

David, if you're referring to the freeing of the slaves, Obama has absolutely no connection, not a scintilla of a connection, with the Afro-American slave experience. Not the suffering. Not the humiliation. Not the creativity. Nada.

JohnAnt

The Lincoln-Obama rev. Bible - how does it start?
"In the beginning was the word. And the word was 'maybe'."

David

"David, if you're referring to the freeing of the slaves, Obama has absolutely no connection, not a scintilla of a connection, with the Afro-American slave experience. Not the suffering. Not the humiliation. Not the creativity. Nada."

Well that's utter balls. I'm sure Obama and many of his contemporaries would love to hear you tell them they did not face racism and discrimination when they were growing up in the 60s and 70s.

It can be argued, taking a rather uncontraversial narrative view of history, that the racism, discrimination and segregation in the US was a legacy of the civil war, partly set in motion by the election of Lincoln and a Republican party "founded on one single issue-the freeing of slaves" (according to commentators in the South).
While the civil war was won, and slaves freed, there was still a culture of racism that festered for decades, leading to the civil rights movement, unfortunately necessary.

You can easily see a thread linking the efforts of the abolutionists and Lincoln, through Jim Crow, through Luther King and through to Obama.

Ray

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Had Lincoln survived to serve his second term, maybe such magnanimity might have persuaded both sides to let bygones be bygones and get on with the job of building a fair and just society for all.

Instead, Northern 'carpetbaggers' lauded it over Southern whites, who in turn retreated back into their KKK cabals and their racism. A tragic opportunity missed.

Atticus Finch

This is all part of Obama's strategy to reach across divides. He is not just invoking a great American President. He is invoking a great Republican President who healed the nation.

Verity - It doesn't matter where Obama comes from to lay any claim to the history of slavery. He knows that many ordinary Americans will put two and two together and assume that a black president will only represent black views. Putting Lincoln on the table partly neutralises that assumption.

The selection of evangelical christian Rick Warren as the pastor for the inauguration is part of the same strategy.

Obama is sending a message to Republicans and evangelicals that he can do business with them.

Token gestures can be powerfully symbollic and Obama knows this. They have little bearing on policy but people will buy into it.

Verity

David writes, rather perplexingly, that Obama would have faced discrimination (which has nothing to do with the Afro-American experience whose coattails he has tried to ride) in the 60s and 70s when he was growing up.

How old is the guy? Mid-forties? So that would be the Seventies, then, when he was living in Indonesia? He faced "discrimination" for being approximately the same colour as most Indonesians? Excuse me?

Then at some point his mother dragged him back to the US (on an Indonesian passport as presumably he didn't qualify for an American one; you need a birth certificate) to Hawaii.

By the Eighties, when he would have been taken to Hawaii, racial discrimination already had a bad name in the US - but in any event, Hawaii, so remote from the rest of the United States, was always the least prejudiced state - probably partly because most of the inhabitants were brown. (Now they're Japanese, but that's another story.)

Atticus Finch - Thanks for the patronising little explanation, but I think anyone reading this blog has a pretty firm grasp of gesture politics.

Ray writes: "Southern whites, who in turn retreated back into their KKK cabals and their racism."

Well, thank God they didn't retreat forward! They would have been in a terrible pickle. The KKK wasn't "Southern" whites, by the way. It was "Southern Democrats". The KKK was an arm of the Democratic Party. The Republicans outlawed it.

David

Actually, I wrote Obama and his contemporaries, and the discrimination that prevailed at the time, and still exists, has followed through as I said, from the civil war. Hence there is a nice narrative thread connecting the first black president with the election of Lincoln.

Poor Verity. So bitter. So desperate to denigrate Obama that he's both a Machiavellian genius and an untalented no-mark.

Love the pathetic reference to the birth certificate. He's just got to be illegitimate, hasn't he? Surely in a proper democracy only the people YOU approve of will win.

Verity

David - I clambered over your post hoping to stumble across a coherent thought.

There weren't any detectable.

Therefore, perhaps you can clarify, point by point, and eschew the raw emotion.

You write: "Actually, I wrote Obama and his contemporaries, and the discrimination that prevailed at the time, and still exists, has followed through as I said, from the civil war."

1. The discrimination that prevailed at what time? When he was living in Indonesia? Most Indonesians are brown, although there are some tribes that are darker. Obama isn't black. As he said himself, he's a mulatto. (His words; don't clutch your heart.) In Hawaii, to which he returned, the race of the people is South Pacific, PNG - also brown.

By the time he went to Harvard, "positive discrimination" was going like gangbusters and is probably why he was appointed Editor of The Harvard Review (for which he never wrote a single article during his tenure). So if there had been any racism, it would have been the Harvard faculty discriminating against their own race - Caucasians.

2. "Poor Verity. So bitter. So desperate to denigrate Obama that he's both a Machiavellian genius and an untalented no-mark."

Your sentence doesn't make sense. Where have I ever averred that Obama is a)a genuis; or b) a scheming genius of Machiavellian stature ...?

Tell me when I ever opined that Obama is even very bright?

And where did I write that he's an "untalented no mark". (What does "no mark" mean? Is it a well-known phrase?) I've never denied that he is a virtuoso on the auto-cue.

2. "Love the pathetic reference to the birth certificate. He's just got to be illegitimate, hasn't he?"

He has? I believe that illegitimate babies get birth certificates, just like anyone else, don't they? I don't believe I've ever read that Obama may be illegitimate ... although now you bring this up, perhaps the man who he claims as his father is not the man named on this birth certificate ... and this is why he is refusing to release it? Hmmmm ... intriguing new theory.

So now we've got Philip Berg's theory that Obimbo was actually born in Kenya, with his grandmother swearing she was right there at the birth (as, presumably, was his mother) and your theory that "Dreams of My Father" may not be that father but some notional father?

Oh, dear!

And it has been suggested that the man who never wrote an article for The Harvard Review despite being the editor of this revered publication, suddenly wrote a full-length book about the father who deserted him. As Obama is not what we call a wordsmith, it has been suggested it was written for him by William Ayers. (Who is doing quite a commendable job at appointments in the new administration, btw.)

D Day

Good Lord!
It's bad enough to have Democrats and liberals making the ridiculous comparisons to Lincoln without you "conservative" Brits doing it too.
No one has used the Lincoln bible because it would seem the presumptuous act of an egomaniac.

Verity

D Day. Agreed.

The book "The Audacity of Hope" which was purportedly written by Obimbo, should just be shortened to The Audacity.

What a creep.

Verity

Atticus Finch, and I am posting on the deeply stupid comment- at-the-top-of-the-thread box (DUH) which we all thought had been beaten to death:

Americans are well aware that Obombi has no history in the United States. His mother from Kansas "married" his father from Kenya around 50 years ago.

To make it clear: his mother was white. She was from Kansas. They never had slaves in Kansas. Ever. Please try to understand American geography and the vastness of the United States. Obimbi had no connection whatsoever with the slave trade - having been born after it had been over for 100 years - except possibly through an Arab ancestor. They lived in Hawaii, which has never had slaves. They moved to Indonesia. No slaves. He came back to Hawaii on an Indonesian passport, which would tell us that his mother didn't have a birth certificate to swear to his US citizen status. Still no slaves in Hawaii.

"Verity - It doesn't matter where Obama comes from to lay any claim to the history of slavery. He knows that many ordinary Americans will put two and two together and assume that a black president will only represent black views. Putting Lincoln on the table partly neutralises that assumption."

No. Stupid people will think he comes from a long line of slavery, and that he is complicit in this assumption is dreadful. Dreadful to all those slaves who lived their lives as best they could, as slaves, and those who worked, underground, for generations, to free them.

Obama's a cheap trick. And now he's hitching a ride on Abraham Lincoln's Bible.