Peter McKay: I'm sorry, Obama is no Lincoln
[Peter McKay is a Daily Mail columnist.]
We are told Barack Obama's inauguration speech tomorrow will be inspired by Abraham Lincoln, America's 16th and best-loved president.
Most presidents hark back to Abe. Ronald Reagan liked to pre- empt jokes about his age by saying he and Lincoln had been contemporaries. But surely Obama is in danger of overdoing it.
At the weekend, he took a special inaugural train to Washington, just as Lincoln did. After winning, he invited Americans to release 'our better angels,' paraphrasing a remark Lincoln made in his second inauguration speech. He talks continually about what Lincoln said and did.
From the moment he began running for the presidency - beginning in Illinois, like Lincoln - Obama set out to hijack Abe's legend, conscious always of the symbolism.
He'd be the first black man to become president, 140 years after Lincoln freed the African slaves during the U.S. Civil War.
During the campaign, he made use of a Lincoln remark when rebutting opponents - 'If you don't stop telling lies about me, I'll start telling the truth about you.' He quoted Lincoln on Illinois: 'To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.' And when he won - as Lincoln did - he pulled a campaign enemy, Hillary Clinton, into his cabinet and quoted Abe on the need for 'humility'.
But does he have Lincoln's guts? 'Honest Abe', against bitter opposition, even in his own Republican Party, was prepared to commit America to a Civil War to prevent southern states seceding from the Union into a Confederation. There was no guarantee the Union side would win. It was make or break.
Obama faces the greatest fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, for the same reason we do: the Clinton and Bush administrations - like the Blair/ Brown regime here - relaxed banking regulations, licensing an insane era of frantic spivvery in which bankers lent indigent creditors money they could not possibly repay and described the result as an asset.
Will Obama control the financiers of Wall Street, or will they control him?..
Read entire article at Daily Mail (UK)
We are told Barack Obama's inauguration speech tomorrow will be inspired by Abraham Lincoln, America's 16th and best-loved president.
Most presidents hark back to Abe. Ronald Reagan liked to pre- empt jokes about his age by saying he and Lincoln had been contemporaries. But surely Obama is in danger of overdoing it.
At the weekend, he took a special inaugural train to Washington, just as Lincoln did. After winning, he invited Americans to release 'our better angels,' paraphrasing a remark Lincoln made in his second inauguration speech. He talks continually about what Lincoln said and did.
From the moment he began running for the presidency - beginning in Illinois, like Lincoln - Obama set out to hijack Abe's legend, conscious always of the symbolism.
He'd be the first black man to become president, 140 years after Lincoln freed the African slaves during the U.S. Civil War.
During the campaign, he made use of a Lincoln remark when rebutting opponents - 'If you don't stop telling lies about me, I'll start telling the truth about you.' He quoted Lincoln on Illinois: 'To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.' And when he won - as Lincoln did - he pulled a campaign enemy, Hillary Clinton, into his cabinet and quoted Abe on the need for 'humility'.
But does he have Lincoln's guts? 'Honest Abe', against bitter opposition, even in his own Republican Party, was prepared to commit America to a Civil War to prevent southern states seceding from the Union into a Confederation. There was no guarantee the Union side would win. It was make or break.
Obama faces the greatest fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, for the same reason we do: the Clinton and Bush administrations - like the Blair/ Brown regime here - relaxed banking regulations, licensing an insane era of frantic spivvery in which bankers lent indigent creditors money they could not possibly repay and described the result as an asset.
Will Obama control the financiers of Wall Street, or will they control him?..