Lincoln and Obama in 2009

In John F. Harris and Alexander Burns,"Straw Man? Historians say Obama is no Lincoln," Politico, 15 December,"historians" primarily means Sean Wilentz. Toss with a quote from Eric Foner and a reference to Doris Kearns Goodwin. That's about it.

Whether"the historians" like it or not, Lincoln and Obama will be inextricably linked by writers in 2009 – writers who will make the bicentennial of his birth the year of Lincoln and the year of his inauguration the year of Obama. James L. Swanson, the historian of Lincoln's assassination, counts at least 60 Abraham Lincoln titles that will appear in 2009. Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, the first multi-volume biography of Lincoln since Carl Sandburg's, is surely foremost among them. Burlingame's scholarship has mastered the sources, including Lincoln's early anonymous op-eds, as no one else has ever done.

Michael Calderone mentions four Obama authors: 1) the New Yorker's David Remnick, whose"The Joshua Generation" will form the core of his book on Obama, race and politics in contemporary America; 2) the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, is doing a book about Obama's' first year in office; 3) The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama by PBS's Gwen Ifill, groups Obama with a new generation of African American politicians -- Newark's Cory Booker, Massachusetts' Deval Patrick, and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama -- and will appear on Inauguration Day; and 4) Robert Draper has a contract for a work spanning the 40 years from the death of Martin Luther King to the election of Barack Obama. Unmentioned in Calderone's list are: King biographer David Garrow, who is at work on an Obama biography, and campaign books by Newsweek's Richard Wolffe and the Washington Post's David Marannis.