Rick Perry’s Wrong About Lincoln

Writing almost 60 years ago, David Donald—who would later emerge as America’s preeminent biographer of Abraham Lincoln—observed that Americans, and especially Republican politicians, exhibit a compulsive desire to “get right” with the nation’s 16th president. Tracing this tendency back to the late 19th century, he noted, “Every four years Republican hopefuls sought—and presumably secured Lincoln’s endorsement.”

So it continued last evening, when former Texas Gov. Rick Perry—a likely candidate for his party’s presidential nomination—addressed the Stafford County GOP Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner in Dover, New Hampshire.

There was just one problem: He got Lincoln backwards.