Lincoln and Bush--No Comparison

Lately, you occasionally hear or read about how about one of the crazies has compared George W Bush to Abraham Lincoln. However, the comparison couldn't be less apt.

One was a great American who gave all, including his life, for his country. The other cares about nothing beyond electoral politics, strengthening his "base," and pushing forward a narrow agenda to the detriment of his country. To: wit:

[T]he calm also reflects a political calculation among Bush's strategists. In their eyes, mass opinion doesn't matter as much as the attitude of the voters motivated to turn up on election day. As long as the president pleases his base, strategists believe they can produce an electorate that is more sympathetic to Bush and the GOP than the country is generally. That means Bush and his party can survive ratings with the general public that might sink other presidents.

............

This strategy was the key to Bush's win in November. Exit polls showed that Democrat John F. Kerry outpolled Bush significantly among moderates and narrowly with independents. But Bush significantly increased the share of Republicans and conservatives in the electorate from 2000. And they provided him margins lopsided enough to offset his mediocre performance among swing voters.

Bush's congressional strategy follows from his electoral strategy. In issues such as Social Security and taxes, Bush has usually proposed policies that enthuse most Republicans and enrage most Democrats. Most often, he has preferred to pass his initiatives with a skintight partisan majority than to compromise to attract more Democrats (and sometimes even moderate Republicans).

This hardball approach has allowed Bush to advance much of his agenda, often by the slimmest of margins (such as the recent 51-49 Senate vote approving drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). It's also helped him maintain enormous support among rank-and-file Republicans.

But this success has come at the cost of widening the country's political divisions. Bush's electoral strategy makes him inherently less sensitive than most presidents to the concerns of voters outside his core coalition. He appears content to operate as president of half the country. The gap between Bush's approval rating among voters in his own party and the opposition is the largest ever recorded. Bush's approval rating among moderates in Gallup surveys hasn't exceeded 50% since January 2004, and he's passed that milestone among independents just twice in the last year.

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Ron Brownstein
"Bush's Neglect of Consensus May be Kindling for Fiery
Senate Showdown"
LA Times, April 11, 2005



The presidency is not something that could be enjoyed. Remembering its barrenness for him, one can believe that the life of Lincoln's soul was almost entirely without consummation. Sandberg remarks that there were thirty-one rooms in the White House and that Lincoln was not at home in any of them. This was the house for which had sacrificed so much!

As the months passed, a deathly weariness settled over him. Once when Noah Brooks suggested that he rest, he replied: "I suppose it is good for the body. But the tired part of me is inside and out of reach." There had always been a part of him, inside and out of reach, that had looked upon his ambition with detachment and wondered if the game was worth the candle. Now he could see the truth of what he had long dimly known and perhaps hopefully suppressed--that for a man of sensitivity and compassion to exercise great powers in a time of crisis is a grim and agonizing thing. Instead of glory, he once said, he had found only "ashes and blood." This was, for him, the end product of that success myth by which he had lived and for which he had been so persuasive a spokesman. He had had his ambitions and fulfilled them, and met heartache in his triumph.

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Richard Hofstadter
"The American Political Tradition"
Pg. 173