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Timothy Egan: Obama's Lincoln Moment?

[Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter.]

There must be, in the glaring light of an anxious, heat-stinging summer, an image or two from the past appearing in President Obama’s White House.

As Abraham Lincoln had an Army of the Potomac that looked inert under Gen. George McClellan, Obama has an economy stalled and troubled, and two wars, one now branded as the nation’s longest, its outcome never more uncertain.

Where to advance? Where to retreat? Who to fire? Who to hire? The general of the one conflict, in Afghanistan, has been removed, as was McClellan by an impatient president. But the other campaign, the one to resurrect an economy ruined by debt and unregulated greed, seems intractable....
Read entire article at NYT