150 years since Lincoln became immortal; what would he be today?

Anybody who hangs around political people gets used to certain catchphrases and concepts being tossed out when one wants to score political points.

One such idea I have often heard expressed is the notion that, if he were alive now, Abraham Lincoln certainly would not be a Republican. I can’t keep track of the number of Democrats who have suggested that a modern-day Lincoln would have converted to their political party.

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN skeptical of the suggestion. Not so much because I think Republican partisans of the modern-day are somehow correct in their way of thinking about the biggest-name politico Illinois has ever produced.

It’s just that I think Lincoln himself might have become so repulsed by some of the actions committed GOP of the 21^st Century that if he had left, it would be to create yet another political party.

Perhaps someone like H. Ross Perot, goofy ears and all, is the modern-day equivalent of Lincoln. Not that I’m implying the Texas billionaire who actually gained a significant number of votes when he tried running for president in 1992 has much in common with Lincoln.

But perhaps I just think Lincoln would be ornery and independent enough to find all of the current political structure somewhat repugnant!

LET’S NOT FORGET that during his lifetime, Lincoln was affiliated primarily with the Whig Party. When the potential for slavery to spread into the territories we now think of as the Plains states split the Whigs into factions, Lincoln wound up eventually going with the one that opposed slavery.

Which wound up becoming the Republican Party, and Lincoln became their first presidential candidate who managed to win the election.

I do believe that the extent to which the old Southern agenda of “state’s rights” being used to justify repulsive racial policies and other means of imposing on the civil rights of certain people who don’t fit their image of who belongs in this country would have bothered Lincoln.

But I wonder if Lincoln would see the modern-day Democratic Party as being a bit dysfunctional in its own right – so many factions that have trouble uniting that the Republicans in their ideological rigidity are still capable of winning elections.

OF COURSE, THE reason we pay so much attention to Lincoln’s memory is because of the events of 150 years ago Tuesday. Just days after the first military surrender that essentially ended the Civil War (even though fighting continued in spurts for two more months), Lincoln was shot. Under circumstances that ensure his critics in life were permanently disgraced.

Lincoln died early the next morning, laid out in a bed so small that he had to be put on it on an angle. And yes, generations of Chicago schoolchildren have gone on field trips to the Chicago Historical Society museum to see that bed (along with the charred crackers that survived the Chicago Fire of 1871).

In fact, a part of me would be inclined to go to the museum Tuesday to see the bed, except that it is on loan for the year to the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. That’s a bit much of a drive for me to make on a whim.

So perhaps we should spend part of the day pondering Lincoln’s memory, which gets distorted in so many ways by people eager to simplify his story – particularly those too eager to engage in Confederate historic revisionism.

LINCOLN MAY NOT have been the pure abolitionist who was willing to do away with slavery of black people for the common good. Although his critics of the day were certainly willing to see him that way to benefit their own hostile thoughts.

Just last week, the Washington Post published a commentary suggesting that, “Today’s GOP is the party of Jefferson Davis, not of Lincoln.”

That might be a bit simplistic a thought, but there is a certain amount of truth to it – in that I wonder if modern-day Republicans find a bit of shame in the fact that their political party historically was known as the “Party of Lincoln.”

Wishing instead they could regard Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon of the “Southern Strategy” and Ronald Reagan (who throughout the years chased off those Republicans who were motivated by Lincoln’s ideals) as their true founders.

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Kennedy niche in our collective memory only now coming into focus

We’re at the half-century mark – 50 years Friday since the moment when someone with objections to then-President John F. Kennedy’s existence decided to take the matter into his own hands with a rifle.

Half century-old newsprint ...

Yet in the very acknowledgement of the fact that it takes time for the people to figure out what they think about anything, it is not the least bit surprising that it is only now we’re starting to figure out what we think of those two-and-a-half years that Kennedy was president.

WE’RE ALL NOW realizing that those ideologues of the 1960s who screeched and screamed that Kennedy was a subversive were just being ridiculous. A pair of recent polls by the Gallup Organization shows that not only does Kennedy get the highest-overall approval rating of 20^th Century presidents, he also has the closet partisan split.

Both people of Democratic and Republican partisan leanings look favorably on the days of JFK. By now, enough time has passed that the trash talk of the past has withered away.

Now my point is not to present a Kennedy love-fest of any kind. Personally, I think the man died way too soon before he could accomplish acts that would have given his presidency a lasting legacy.

JFK and the whole concept of the “New Frontier” and “Camelot” is all about a promise that went unfulfilled.

BUT IT SEEMS to take us time to make that realization. As evidenced by another recent Gallup poll – one that judged the most recent presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Republican partisans are determined to believe that Obama will ultimately be judged by history as the worst president.

... making somebody rich on eBay. But, ...

Although if the experience we had in Chicago in coping with the “Council Wars” of the mid-1980s is any evidence, it seems that the people who ultimately will be remembered as the “worst” are the ones whose ideological taint is such that they devoted all their time to thwarting Obama.

There are those people amongst us who are going to have to come up with some serious apologies for their current actions – or else live with the permanent taint of scuzziness that they’re painting themselves with now!

... how much of its "fact" ...

IT MAY WELL turn out to be the worst thing we will be able to say about Obama is that he was too weak and ineffectual to crush his political opposition – thereby preventing him from achieving his accomplishments.

Of course, this isn’t a one-way political game – those with Democratic Party leanings are determined to believe the years of Bush, the younger, will turn out to be remembered as the “worst” presidency of our time (too many of us don’t pay attention to anything before our time).

Some are determined to believe he will rank worse than Richard M. Nixon – although that would be an accomplishment since Gallup found evidence that he’s the one presidency that can unite the parties in the ill-will they remember of it.

Although my own comical memory of the demise of Nixon was that on the day he resigned, an encyclopedia salesman literally showed up at my parents’ doorstep. He literally had a display book to tout his product that included the fact that Gerald R. Ford had risen to replace the president – even though that had become official just a few hours before!

BUT AS FOR the Nixon/Kennedy campaign prior or the events of 50 years ago Friday, I can’t play that “game” some people like to talk about – the one in which they reminisce about where they were at the exact moment they learned Kennedy was shot.

I didn’t exist. My mother used to reminisce about the day (and when I was a kid used to keep Kennedy memorial tribute issues of Life magazine tucked away in a drawer). But it was another nine months before she and my father married – and nearly two years before I was born.

... still holds up today?

I actually wonder what she would have made (she passed away just over three years ago) of all the hoo-hah being spread about Friday. Here’s hoping that those of us still amongst us who remember the day have goals of what could have been achieved had Kennedy survived actually become reality someday.

And that the day will come when we can reach a non-ideological view of what our most recent presidents have meant to us.

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EXTRA: How does Obama “shoot” fit?

We're not even close to a repeat

I’m glad that we’re not in a national sense of mourning these days, because you just know that in today’s politically partisan climate there’d be some nutcase who would want to complain that Barack Obama isn’t worthy of our sadness if someone were to try to kill him.

Which may say more about how low our society has sunk.

BECAUSE THE FACT is that history will now record Obama as one of the presidents (along with Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt -- if you buy into the story about former Mayor Anton Cermak) upon whom someone tried to commit the act of assassination – “succeeding” in the cases of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.

Of course, Reagan took that bullet (then jokingly told first lady Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck”), whereas Obama only caused some dings in the outer hull of the White House that perhaps decades from now will be a political curiosity (some future White House tour guide will point to them as evidence of how stupid some of us could be back in the 2010s).

Oscar Ramiro Ortega Hernandez (that’s Oscar Ortega if you’re Anglicizing it and treating him like a human being; which perhaps you don’t want to) is the man who now faces charges as the would-be assassin – even though Obama wasn’t even in Washington at the time of the shooting.

It seems that Ortega fired a Romanian-made high-powered rifle at the White House itself – aiming at the residential quarters of the building. Secret Service agents have told various reporter-types how they have found at least two bullets.

BUT IN OUR day and age, anything that can be perceived as a threat will warrant that serious charge will get it. We certainly have come quite a ways from 1963 when federal officials had to squabble with Dallas authorities in the hours after then-President Kennedy was killed.

Because technically a presidential assassination wasn’t a federal crime, which would have put Texas authorities in charge of any criminal investigation (and there was the sense that the grandparents of the current generation of conservative ideologues might not have been that eager to aggressively investigate such a case).

As it is, I already can sense the ideologues objecting to the use of the words “assassinate” and “Obama” in the same sentence – which is what the New York Times did on their website Thursday in writing about how Ortega claimed the president to be “the Antichrist.”

Which is a pathetic joke in and of itself because we all know that anyone who truly was an “Antichrist” would probably never set foot in Chicago – it’s too cold during our winters.

BACK ON A serious note, Ortega now becomes a high-profile case for a man from Idaho who will spend the bulk of the rest of his life (he’s only 21) in a federal correctional center (and someone like Edward R. Vrdolyak can breathe a sigh of relief that he got out of federal prison on Thursday before Ortega could get into the system). He just assured himself more public attention than he’ll ever be worth.

The thought of an Obama presidency being part of an assassination string also manages to screw up our history.

Because from 1840 through 1960, every president elected in a year ending in zero died while in office. The 1980 election that gave us Reagan could be seen by some morbid types as continuing that string because someone tried to shoot him.

It was George W. Bush elected in 2000 who managed to beat the streak by not getting shot at during his two terms in office (and for that, I am thankful).

IT’S JUST A shame for us all that someone felt compelled to try to start up a new streak – which I suspect will amount to liberal-perceived presidents elected in just about any year will have some deranged person influenced by ideologues try to take history into their own hands.

That is a more scary thought than anything that ever comes out of Rick Perry’s mouth on the campaign trail.

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