How much of today’s political rhetoric will someday be apologized for as silly?

It will be 150 years this week since Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address – his brief speech at the battlefield-turned-cemetery that helped to put the Civil War into a high, moral context – rather than just a bloodbath.

Significance not immediately realized

Yet there were those who disparaged Lincoln during his lifetime. He truly was a person who could never have comprehended the glory with which his image is now draped, based on anything that happened during his lifetime.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Harrisburg Patriot-News newspaper in Pennsylvania went so far as to apologize for what its predecessor (the Patriot & Union newspaper) wrote about the speech when it occurred.

The Patriot-News “regrets the error” that the Patriot & Union wrote that Lincoln made “silly remarks” that were motivated by partisan politics.

“Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time,” were mistaken in their coverage, the 21^st Century take of the Harrisburg-based newspaper wrote.

Now I’m not about to say whether or not a reporter-type of the past was intoxicated (anything’s possible). Nor am I going to rant about how this correction was self-serving and did nothing more than to get a local paper some national attention.

Reason for recent presidential criticism

BUT WHEN I learned of this editorial, it couldn’t help but make me think of our modern-day situation. One in which our current president gets all the abuse the ideologues think he is worthy of, and where anyone who doesn’t share in their rancid rhetoric gets decried as somehow being “un-American.”

And with the fact that the Affordable Care Act’s implementation isn’t going smoothly, there are those who are willing to pile on to the president as well.

It should not be any surprise that the president’s approval rating isn’t all that high these days (40 percent approval rating, according to the Gallup Organization, with 53 percent disapproving of Obama’s performance).

There’s also a recent Gallup poll that says only 28 percent of people questioned think Obama will be remembered as an “outstanding” or “above average” president, with 31 percent saying he’ll be “average” and 40 percent saying he’ll be remembered as “below average/poor.” That's far from the worst -- both Presidents Bush are thought of less-highly, as are former presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.

An impression from JFK's own time

THAT STUDY FOUND that John F. Kennedy (who this week will have been deceased for 50 years – too many morbid “anniversaries” in coming days) is regarded the most-highly in history amongst recent presidents.

Although I can recall many studies throughout the years that show Kennedy’s legacy approval rating, so to speak, bouncing up-and-down depending on the circumstances.

My point being that these things are flexible. They’re alterable. Nothing is carved in stone.

I wonder what it will be like when much of the rhetoric we hear and read about Obama these days will sound ridiculously dated, or just ridiculous.

WE PROBABLY SHOULD remember that much of the trash-talk Lincoln faced was just as over-the-top as what Obama gets these days – particularly from the ranks of trash-talk radio that seeks to make money by appealing to their Tea Party-type listeners.

Apology owed, although not likely to ever come

It has been eight years since I visited the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., and my most vivid memory was of the exhibit devoted to the nasty rhetoric. Literally getting to read the libelous stories and commentary and hearing some of the slurs read aloud.

There are a lot more publications than the Patriot-News that probably owe Lincoln’s legacy an apology. How many publications are going to have their future incarnations issuing apologies to Obama (probably long after he’s departed this Earth) for the things they wrote, or allowed to be said without challenging them?

Will they be able to get away with just an apology – that will come across as self-serving in the future as the one Lincoln got earlier this month?

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We love him, we love him not; what do we really think of Rahm Emanuel?

It was quite a way to start the working portion of my day Wednesday – stepping off a Metra commuter train at the LaSalle Street station to hear a chant echoing off in the distance.


Chicago was kept safe Wednesday from angry schoolteachers. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

And as I walked up Clark Street (headed to the Daley Center courthouse for an unrelated event), their chant became clearer and clearer – Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Rahm Emanuel’s got to go!

YES, IT WAS the lovely batch of individuals from the Chicago Teachers Union, picketing the Chicago Public Schools offices before marching to the Thompson Center state government building (passing City Hall in the process) to let it be known they think it stinks that some 3,000 people (including more than 1,000 teachers) are about to be laid off.

The public schools system has financial problems, just like many other governmental units these days. The raw numbers for the Chicago system sound larger because the system itself is bigger.

More kids than any other school system. So they need more teachers.

So 1,000 Chicago teachers is probably the equivalent of some rural school district having to let a dozen people go.

IT HURTS! PARTICULARLY since many of those who teach in the Chicago Public Schools system have some sort of special dedication to education as a profession. Otherwise, they wouldn’t put up with the constant grief they are subjected to – and which they expressed publicly on Wednesday.

EMANUEL: Not the 'man of the hour'

Personally, the part of Wednesday’s protests that caught my attention was the police presence. That block was likely the safest place in Chicago in the morning hours.

I can’t help but think those officers could have been put to better use had they not been sent to a morning assignment that basically amounted to them standing around watching while school teachers picketed and chanted extremely off-key.

Then again, those officers probably felt a bit safer. Would they really have to venture off to assignments where they’d have to encounter real criminals? Or does someone really think that schoolteachers expressing their discontent with their treatment are criminal in nature?

NOT THAT ANY of this is new in nature. It was just this weekend that I picked up a copy of The Nation magazine – which featured on its cover an essay about the level of outrage that exists in Chicago toward “Rahm Emanuel’s austerity agenda.”

Which really is nothing more than Emanuel bringing his hard-headed tactics from his days in Congress and as White House chief of staff to City Hall.

This is the man who had organized labor and Latino ethnic groups suspicious of him because of the perception he didn’t really care about their issues, and wasn’t about to let their concerns hijack his own priorities.

Now, we can add the Chicago Teachers Union to the list of people who don’t have much use for Emanuel. Although I suspect Rahm himself prefers to look at it as gaining the support of people who’d prefer that the teachers union would just “Drop Dead!”

SO WHERE DOES Emanuel turn for some lovin’, or at the very least, someone who won’t publicly detest him?

About the only place that was willing to respect him on Wednesday was at City Hall. For the mayor on Wednesday made public his choice of a replacement for retiring 33^rd Ward Alderman Dick Mell.

Emanuel, after using a process he created to accept applications and review the qualifications of a dozen finalists, went along with Mell’s desire that his daughter, Deborah, get the post.

No one who pays attention to City Hall on a regular basis was shocked by the choice. In fact, the only real surprise would have been if anybody BUT Deb Mell had got the post.

BECAUSE THAT WOULD have been a sure-fire way to trigger a political brawl, since Dick Mell remains the Democratic ward committeeman and would have made life uncomfortable for any Emanuel-chosen alderman not named “Deb Mell.”

Along with the alderman himself.

And Emanuel has enough enemies these days without needing to accumulate any more.

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