As A Writer, Obama's No Lincoln

[Geee]

American Thinker:

The teleprompters at President Barack Obama's inaugural address were still powering down when British literary heavyweight Jonathan Raban deemed Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln."

Raban was hardly alone in this enthusiasm. Later that year, Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, told a conference of (sigh!) grant writers, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln."

Never mind that Landesman, an Obama appointee, overlooked Grant, Wilson, Hoover, and Nixon among other book writers or that Lincoln never wrote a book. The point was made: Obama was Lincoln's literary heir apparent.

In a speech to an SRO crowd of historians in late 2010, Harvard's James Kloppenberg upped the adulatory ante. He described the president as "gifted," a "genius," a man of "exceptional intelligence," one who writes "brilliantly and poignantly." Obama, as Kloppenberg saw it, was a "true intellectual" in a class with Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Wilson, and, yes, Abraham Lincoln. According to the New York Times, the crowd greeted his extended gush "with prolonged applause."

Abraham Lincoln knew something about madness. If he feared anything more than "a human form with reason fled," the subject of an 1846 poem, it was "the wild and furious passions" of a mob. One could only imagine what he would have thought of a mania that not only carried a pretender like Barack Obama to the White House, but that also, fantastically, lifted him to the literary heights.

Thanks to Fred Kaplan's insightful 2008 book, Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer, the reader has a sense of how Lincoln might have responded. In Stephen Douglas, after all, Lincoln faced an opportunistic Illinois senator whose rhetoric combined "linguistic shiftiness, hyperbole, and disregard for the integrity of fact." He knew the type. As Kaplan shows, only Lincoln's relentless self-improvement as a thinker and writer enabled him, finally, to prevail.

That Lincoln could write at all was unusual for his time and place. His father, a hardscrabble farmer on civilization's edge, could not write and saw no reason for his son to learn. Young Abe simply willed himself. True, he did not have the distractions that plagued the young Obama -- say, TV's Brady Bunch or body-surfing at Waikiki -- but he did have distractions of his own. Backbreaking fieldwork comes to mind. Still, Lincoln persisted.

His friends noticed. However cursory his schooling, Lincoln was "always ahead of all the classes he ever was in," said one. He was "exceedingly studious," said another. He would write whenever he could, sometimes just on chalkboard if there was no paper. Even as a boy, he wrote about things of consequence -- temperance, slavery, cruelty to animals, American history. By nineteen, said a friend, Lincoln was "the best penman [writer] in the Neighborhood."

No one attests to Obama's early intellect or industry. Sympathetic biographer David Remnick tells us that he was an "unspectacular" student in his two years at Columbia University and at every stop before that going back to grade school. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama tells Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did too well in college."

[Valin]

Geee

 

As A Writer, Obama's No Lincoln

 

As a leader he ain't no Lincoln either.