An Obama Presidency for Lincoln’s Two-Hundredth Birthday

The next president will be inaugurated just over three weeks before Abraham Lincoln’s two hundredth birthday. It will mark a most appropriate moment for the nation to return to the ideals and principles from which it has strayed so far under the leadership of what so plainly is no longer the Party of Lincoln.

The disastrous war in Iraq, growing violence in Afghanistan, unprecedented deficits and debt, a slowing economy, soaring energy prices, global warming, the loss of respect and support for the United States around the world, the concentration of wealth among the hyper-rich, the lack of health insurance, the destruction of retirement programs, illegal immigration . . . there are ample reasons for the American people to desire a change.

Americans are fed up with the politics of division. In April, George W. Bush proclaimed himself “The Decider.” He got a few letters wrong. He is really The Divider.

The last thing our nation needs in 2008 is another 50-50 election of bitter red/blue division. What America needs is a leader who practices the politics of multiplication rather than division.

The person who has the greatest potential to be the Multiplier has just returned from a highly successful visit to Africa: Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

Given the racial history of our nation, the proposition that a black man could win decisively and bring much of the nation together seems preposterous. But Sen. Obama has proven himself to be a unifier. His is a quintessentially American biography. The child of an immigrant father and an American-born mother, Sen. Obama believes in the American Dream because he has lived it. Diversity is what America is all about, and he is diversity.

Most successful politicians in recent years have sought to widen chasms; Barack Obama seeks to build bridges across them. He speaks of “a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear.”

A significant fraction of the American electorate would vote against any black candidate. But Obama would win almost all of the Democratic base that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry and would be very likely to carry Ohio, giving him an Electoral College majority. Beyond this minimum scenario for victory, fascinating possibilities open up. Young people are the age group most disillusioned with President Bush and his war. Yet they do not vote in large numbers. An Obama candidacy would be likely to energize young Americans and really “rock the vote.”

And the prospect of the first black president would be likely to produce a phenomenon similar to the first free election in South Africa. Blacks would register in unprecedented numbers and the percentage of black registrants who actually vote would soar. Add this upsurge in black voters to the minority of whites in the South who vote Democratic and many southern states—including Mississippi—could become winnable for the Democrats.

Democrats must reconnect with religious Americans. There is a growing movement on the part of genuine Christ followers to fight back against those in the misnamed Religious Right who have hijacked Jesus. Sen. Obama speaks eloquently of reclaiming religion for the progressive purposes it should support. His is a voice of reconciliation, while those of the wolves in sheep’s clothing who claim to be “Christians” are voices of recrimination.

The Irreligious Wrong speaks the language of Jesus while totally distorting the meaning; many progressives advocate the meaning of Jesus, but speak in what is a foreign tongue to religious people. Obama speaks the genuine message of Jesus in the language of religious people. While Republicans have used faith as a wedge to divide Americans, Obama uses faith as a means of uniting people of different faiths and of no set faith.

But is Obama too young to be president? He is already older than Theodore Roosevelt and John Kennedy were when they became president and in November 2008 he will be 47 and a year older than Bill Clinton was when he was elected in 1992.

Obama was opposed to the Iraq war from the start, showing a better understanding of the perils of that wholly misguided foreign adventure than either President Bush and his advisors or most of the other potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidates had. George W. Bush is pro-choice on war; on wars of choice, Barack Obama is pro-life.

Consider what a positive signal would be sent to the world if the first African-American president—and a Christian with a Muslim name and heritage—replaced George W. Bush. In terms of the United States reclaiming its moral position and respect in the world, it might well be that the cure for Osama is Obama.

The symbolism of the first African-American president being inaugurated less than a month before the nation celebrates the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator should be enough to dampen the eyes even of political cynics whose tear ducts have long seemed to be vestigial organs.

Our nation has been engaged now for nearly a half century in a second Civil War, one that began in the 1960s, a century after our first one of the 1860s. Sen. Obama can, 200 years after Lincoln’s birth, begin to accomplish what Lincoln called for in his second inaugural address just before the end of the first Civil War: “to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Barack Obama can do what Lincoln hoped to do in 1865: transform what had become the Disunited States back into the United States and restore America to a position of respect around the world.