Obama, Lincoln, and the Perils of Compromise

President Barack Obama’s deep admiration forAbraham Lincoln has already been very well documented. To what extent are we to believe that Obama is influenced by Lincoln, using him as a model for his own presidency? It’s difficult to tell. After all, it’s hard to think of a safer political move here in the 21st century than praising Lincoln. But to the extent that the admiration is genuine and the influence is real, it is very problematic on at least two levels.

First, the Lincoln that Obama thinks he knows may be a bit removed from the Lincoln who actually was.

Second, the Lincoln who actually was made decisions and took courses of action that were not only perhaps unfit for today’s circumstances, but in some ways quite disastrous even in his own time.

Both pitfalls are of course made possible by the popular idiolatry of Lincoln, which has canonized him as a near-mythical figure, an unsullied pillar of American greatness. He is on Mt. Rushmore, the penny, and the five-dollar bill. His birthday is a holiday in many states, and it was conjoined with George Washington’s (both are in February) to create the federal holiday of President’s Day.  He is easily the most quoted president, along with Washington the most famous, and perpetually appearing atop surveys of the best presidents.

While I have a personal aversion to institutionalizing Great Leaders through that kind of icononography (I think it’s antithetical to real democracy), Lincoln was undoubtedly one of the best presidents of all time.  But that does not mean he was simply great. Rather, he was quite complex, he made many mistakes, and he was absolutely a man of the 19th century.

It is oft repeated that the aspect of Lincoln which most drives Obama was the 16th president’s willingness to broker compromise with even the worst of enemies.  This was in fact a prominent tactic of Lincoln’s. However, there are two important things to keep in mind. First, it did not always serve Lincoln well. Some of his cabinet members and generals were dismissive, demeaning, and at times even rebellious, while Confederate leaders never once took him up on any of his countless offers to end theirsecession by peaceful means.

Second, Lincoln bent over backwards to work with everyone in order toaccomplish a very specific goal: preserve the union. From the moment he announced his run for the White House until John Wilkes Booth laid him low in Ford’s Theater, it was forever his first political priority and nothing else was so much as even a distant second. In other words, compromise for its own sake is not necessarily virtuous because it demands necessary evils.

Furthermore, it would be a misreading of history to claim that Lincoln’s willingness to compromise was the primary means by which he achieved his goal. In fact, he was a shrewd politician who used compromise as calculated tactic for not only preserving the union but also for building his own political fortunes.

When during his first inaugural address he offered the secessionist states the easiest terms imaginable for returning to the union, he was not only trying to make it simple for them to come back. He was also giving himself political cover for waging what would prove to be by far and away the bloodiest war in American history when they didn’t.

And as war raged, he continued this strategy of semi-disingenuous compromise with very real and sometimes deleterious effects. More than a year in, Lincoln overrode Union General David Hunter’s proclamation that had ordered the freeing of slaves owned by Confederates in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, condemning many thousands to prolonged bondage.

Questionable compromises continued. When during his second presidential campaign Lincoln reached across the aisle and chose a racist, alcoholic Tennessee Democrat named Andrew Johnson as his running mate, it was because Johnson personified the kind of Southern loyalist whom Lincoln hoped would be the basis for expanding his Republican Party into the South after the war. That Johnson is today universally acknowledged by scholars as one of the very worst presidents to ever disgrace the nation is a stark illustration of the limits of compromise.

Facing mountainous obstacles, Lincoln made moral compromises that today strike us as repulsive. After his first two years in office, Northern support was lagging as the war’s cost in blood and treasure was proving to be absolutely phenomenal.  Many millions felt that it simply wasn’t worth it. Let the South go, they said. So Lincoln finally trotted out the issue of slavery.

Only then, in an effort to shore up support for the ongoing butchery, did he use his bully pulpit to elevate the abolition of slavery as a just moral cause. People were dying by the thousands and many Northerners needed something more than maintaining the union to keep them going. So Lincoln introduced the moral outrage of slavery, which he had previously avoided like the plague, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which effectively freed no slaves, but did expand the North’s agenda. Even then, however, he still offered loyal Southerners the chance to keep their slaves if they returned.

Make no mistake. If Lincoln could have preserved the union without waging war or ending slavery, he would have, and he did both only in service to that goal. Lionize him all you like, but lions want what they want.

What does President Obama want? Three years into his presidency, I’m not very sure. He continues to compromise drastically, as he has most recently on the issue of the debt ceiling. Yet to this point, it is difficult to see how he is using that compromise as a shrewd political tactic to achieve his goals, or what his goals even are.

In 2008, Barack Obama asked the American people to believe. In 2011, as we gear up for the next election, the time has come for the American people to ask him quite pointedly: In what?