Today is his birthday

When I grew up, we used to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12. This was before it got folded into a generic President’s day. In a lovely essay at Power Line, though, you can still read why President Lincoln was such a compelling intellectual figure by the time he reached the White House, and why Americans, facing a major schism, were willing to trust their nation to someone with limited political experience.

This last point is especially important because Obama, with his two years as a political non-entity in the Senate (a role that followed a laughably easy campaign), is trying to liken himself to President Lincoln (with help from a compliant, sycophantic media). Obama has a certain facile intelligence, it’s true, but he’s no Lincoln, as he demonstrated yesterday when he got into an unstatesmanlike snit over Austrialian President John Howard’s comment that only disaster would follow were Obama abruptly to remove troops from Iraq. Incidentally, voters might want to take note of Obama’s inability to handle criticism with grace and intelligence, since that personality failure can have far reaching consequences in a White House resident.

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