As American presidents enter their final months in the White House, they invariably focus on their legacies. That effort to shape history’s judgment invariably leads to comparisons to the greatest of them all: Abraham Lincoln.
George W. Bush and his amen corner certainly tried. In September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared the three-year old Iraq debacle to the Civil War. “I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?’” Five months later, Rudy Giuliani explained that Lincoln had “that ability that a leader has—a leader like George Bush” to “look into the future.” The next spring, Vice President Dick Cheney similarly compared a “very courageous, very consistent, very determined” President Bush to Honest Abe, asking ABC News viewers to “think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War.” And in a hagiographic January 2008 Fox News documentary called George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish, a fawning Bret Baier portrayed the Iraq war commander in chief as a 21st century incarnation to the Great Emancipator:
"We talked a lot about President Lincoln…I tell you what--he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office. And the President reflects on that. This is a President who is really reflecting on his place in history."
Leaving aside for now Baier’s butchery of history (Lincoln was assassinated just six months after comfortably winning re-election), it’s clear that George W. Bush’s place in history won’t be a happy one. His war of choice in Iraq was a calamity measured in blood and treasure, and unleashed sectarian conflict that 14 years later is still tearing the Middle East apart. Bush also presided over an unprecedented meltdown of the American financial system that produced the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. As to his legacy, Bush said hopefully in 2013, “ultimately, history will judge.”
History, on the other hand, will be kind to Barack Hussein Obama, 44th president of the United States. Facing monolithic opposition before he even took the oath of office, President Obama nevertheless saved his country from the abyss. During a period of rapid economic, social, and environmental change, Obama readied his country for the future. Over his eight years in the People’s House, Obama helped expand membership in our national community by enabling women, LGBT people, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and others to redefine the very idea of who is American. And even with the prospect of a period of reaction that will undo some of these gains, over time Obama’s vision will be vindicated and realized, including among many who vilified him at the time.
Much like Abraham Lincoln.
Now, elevating Barack Obama to Lincoln’s heir may seem like quite a reach. For the first Republican president, after all, nothing less than the very existence of the United States of America was at stake. But with a little time and a little distance, the magnitude of his achievements, the significance of his historical role, and the radicalness of his mission for America became clearer. What the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass said about his friend Abraham Lincoln in 1876 could be applied to Barack Obama 140 years later. At the dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument on April 14, 1876, Douglass first crystallized the challenge Lincoln faced:
His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.
Lincoln, Douglass recounted, drew withering attacks from friend and foe alike. But his wisdom, steadfastness, and cool temperament allowed him to win the day and explained why he “belongs to the ages.”
Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.
But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.
None of this was lost on Barack Obama. On the night of his overwhelming victory in November 2008, President-elect Obama didn’t just position himself as a natural successor to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (“I promise you: We as a people will get there.”). Before 250,000 people in Chicago that night, Obama turned to the 16th president to offer an olive branch to the GOP opposition:
"Let's remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House -- a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity. Those are values we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress."
But Obama wasn't content to end there. Acknowledging the gravity of the political schism gripping the United States, Obama recalled Lincoln's plea from his First Inaugural:
"As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not enemies, but friends -- though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.' And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too."
Obama could well have added, “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” In Obama’s time as in Lincoln’s, the opposition chose war.
Using a phrase familiar to our ears, the Charleston Mercury responded to Lincoln’s election by proclaiming, “Yesterday, November the 7th, will long be a memorable day in Charleston. The tea has been thrown overboard—the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.” The next month on December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. By the time Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, six more states had seceded. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens had been sworn in two weeks earlier.
Though facing an economic crisis different in kind and degree from civil war, Barack Obama, too, faced a rejectionist wall well before Inauguration Day. Even before the votes were cast, Republicans and the conservative commentariat were already warning of an “Obama Bear Market.” At McCain rallies throughout the summer and fall of 2008, furious partisans decried “the socialist taking over our country” even as they celebrated “we all hate the same things.” Within days of Obama’s election, Republican leaders were already threatening to filibuster his judicial nominees, obstruct any Democratic health care plan, and even refuse to support a stimulus package at a time when the American economy was shedding 800,000 jobs a month. On the very night of his inauguration in 2009, Republican leaders met over dinner to plot their total opposition to the entire Obama program. "If you act like you're the minority, you're going to stay in the minority,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy told the assembled conservative brain trust, “We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
Despite reaching out to the Republicans in Congress by making tax cuts 40 percent of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the GOP delivered only two votes in the Senate and none in the House. Like the first battle of Bull Run, this “stone wall,” too, came at a time of national crisis. As The Economist explained in August 2011:
The White House looked at the economic situation, sized up Congress, and took its shot. Unfortunately, the situation was far more dire than anyone in the administration or in Congress supposed.
Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.
The Obama administration, Ezra Klein summed it up, was trying to save an economy that “had been run over by a truck.”
But within days of the passage of the stimulus in early February, Barack Obama was under assault from another wrecking crew: the GOP’s tea party movement. Well-funded by the likes of Americans for Prosperity and the Koch brothers and well-mobilized by Fox News, the tea party’s creation myth was a lie. Americans, after all, weren’t “Taxed Enough Already.” The Obama stimulus had just delivered tax relief to 95 percent of working Americans, the largest two-year tax cut since at least World War II. (By 2010, federal taxes as a share of the U.S. economy were at their lowest level since 1950. Even Rick Santelli’s epic “Tea Party in Chicago” rant that helped galvanize the movement wasn’t about bank bailouts, but against the idea of a federal “cram down” of mortgages to help hundreds of thousands of underwater homeowners avoid foreclosure:
“Government is promoting bad behavior … Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It’s a moral hazard.”
As it turned out, the bad behavior would come from the tea party. Fusing not-so thinly veiled racist rhetoric (best captured by “birthers” like Donald Trump) with a set of tried and untrue talking points (“death panels,” “government takeover of health care,” and “pulling the plug on grandma”, etc.), the tea party dominated the media and politics from the summer of 2009 through 2010. Meanwhile in Congress, Republicans easily set records for filibustering legislation, blocking judicial nominees, and stonewalling executive branch appointments. Nevertheless, President Obama stood his ground and stood behind the stimulus and his signature health care reform bill, the Affordable Care Act.
The result in the 2010 midterms was a catastrophic defeat for the president and his Democratic allies. The GOP swept to a massive House majority while winning state houses across the country. But if the President and his party didn’t benefit from the Obama agenda, the American people did.
With its prohibitions against the most predatory practices of the health insurance industry, the unpopular Obamacare was nevertheless covering millions of young adults and protecting millions more policyholders by the 2012 election. And while Republicans including presidential nominee Mitt Romney falsely charged that “Obama made the economy worse,” the overwhelming consensus of economists and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded otherwise.
As the Washington Post reported in June 2012, the House Budget Committee heard testimony from the CBO chief answering a simple question: did the $787 billion Obama stimulus work? Unfortunately for Republican propagandists, director Douglas Elmendorf clearly refuted Mitt Romney's claim that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was "the largest one-time careless expenditure of government money in American history."
Under questioning from skeptical Republicans, the director of the nonpartisan (and widely respected) Congressional Budget Office was emphatic about the value of the 2009 stimulus. And, he said, the vast majority of economists agree.
In a survey conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 80 percent of economic experts agreed that, because of the stimulus, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise.
"Only 4 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed," CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told the House Budget Committee. "That," he added, "is a distinct minority."
Not content with that response, Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp tried again. "Where did Washington mess up?" Huelskamp demanded. "Because you're saying most economists think it should've worked. It didn't." As the Post's Lori Montgomery detailed, Elmendorf drove home the point:
Most economists not only think it should have worked; they think it did work, Elmendorf replied. CBO's own analysis found that the package added as many as 3.3 million jobs to the economy during the second quarter of 2010, and may have prevented the nation from lapsing back into recession.
The federal interventions in the economy, Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder concluded simply, “averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0.”
Now, Lincoln’s dark times were of a different order of magnitude. In the summer of 1862, the 16th president had to put off issuing the Emancipation Proclamation because Northern reverses on the battle field made a mockery of its lofty goals. But after the battle of Antietam that September, Lincoln felt the time was right to announce that “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” In his Second Annual Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, President Lincoln explained the fierce urgency of emancipation set to begin one month later:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.
But thinking anew and acting anew didn’t just require a commitment to freeing the 4 million slaves held in bondage by five million Confederates. Throughout the spring and summer of 1863, Lincoln urged the deployment of black troops. “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom,” Lincoln said, “And the promise being made, must be kept.” Noting reports from some of his commanders that "the emancipation policy, and use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion," Lincoln reminded his critics in August 1863:
"You say you will not fight to free the negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you."
Lincoln didn’t waver in defense of the “new birth of freedom” he had proclaimed to some criticism at Gettysburg, even as worried Northern War Democrats and some Republicans pressed him to do in the tense run-up to the election of 1864. Were he to return black soldiers to slavery, Lincoln declared, "I should be damned in time and eternity."
With good reason. After all, Lincoln had dedicated the new national cemetery at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863 by redefining the meanings of both the Civil War and the American creed itself. (For more background, see Garry Wills' classic, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.)
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.
One hundred and fifty years later, President Barack Obama used his Second Inaugural Address on January 20, 2013 to renew the American commitment that “this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” President Obama followed Abraham Lincoln in elevating the Declaration of Independence as both the promise and the measure of the American project. And by committing the United States to the proposition that women, African Americans, immigrants, gay Americans—all Americans—are all equally members of our nation's expanding circle of liberty, Obama like Lincoln resolved that America "shall have a new birth of freedom."
What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”…
Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.
But if Barack Obama is a living embodiment of the progress made 150 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation declared the slaves "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free," America's "never-ending journey" must still at arrive freedom, justice and equality for all. The Civil War Amendments to the Constitution—the 13th, the 14th and the 15th—truly were, as Justice Antonin Scalia so cynically put it, not “just for the blacks.” Despite the caution and compromises that sometimes characterized much of his first term, by its end President Obama left no doubt that all must be equal members of the American community:
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
For Obama, that debt to Seneca Falls means equal pay for Lilly Ledbetter and all American women. It means the protection of women’s reproductive rights and the recognition of women’s health care needs under the Affordable Care Act. More than 50 years later, the blood shed at Selma demands the protection of voting rights and reform of the criminal justice system. The beatings and arrests at Stonewall were not in vain, but must lead to marriage equality and equal rights for LGBT Americans. The First Amendment guarantees the free practice of religion by members all faiths (and none), including the three million Muslim-Americans we call our friends and neighbors. And a compassionate, humane American isn’t going to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, some 85 percent of whom have been in the United States for longer than five years.
Barack Obama wasn’t the first politician to oppose “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” or even the first in his administration to unequivocally voice support for same-sex marriage. But as one activist put, “We were heard for the first time.” President Obama put his bully pulpit and the U.S. Justice Department behind the quest to make marriage equality the law of the land. In 2015, it took Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to emphatically declare that the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection of the laws apply to same-sex couples.
Gay and lesbian Americans, Kennedy argued, merely "ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right." That day, President Obama called Jim Obergefell not just to congratulate him on his victory, but to thank him:
"Not only have you been a great example for people, but you're also going to bring about a lasting change in this country. And it's pretty rare where that happens. So I couldn't be prouder of you and your husband. God bless you."
Tens of thousands of Americans, encouraged and supported by millions more, sacrificed and suffered so that the United States could "live out the true meaning of its creed.” But they weren't America's only redeemers in 2015. At the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, another group of Americans challenged us to mean what we say in our Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution. Mourning the nine congregants murdered by white supremacist Dylann Roof, President Obama was speaking for—and to—all Americans when he described the redemptive role of the black church:
A sacred place, this church, not just for blacks, not just for Christians but for every American who cares about the steady expansion of human rights and human dignity in this country, a foundation stone for liberty and justice for all.
And if we truly believe what we say in our foundational documents, Obama preached in his eulogy, we surely must embrace the Rev. Clementa Pinckney's vision as our own:
What is true in the south is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free, too.
In one of the truly great American speeches of all time, the 44th president tried to make sense of the heartbreaking carnage at Mother Emanuel, and find hope for the future:
As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other -- but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.
For many, Obama’s words evoked Lincoln’s Second Inaugural on March 4, 1865. Just weeks before the end of the Civil War and his own assassination, President Abraham Lincoln cautioned his countrymen North and South that neither they nor their nation would be redeemed until the promise of liberty for all was made real:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Tragically, Lincoln did not live to see it. The rural country he was elected to save had by the time of his death become a global manufacturing powerhouse with (for a time) the largest army on the planet. But if the Union had won the war, the freed slaves lost the peace. Racist terror, at best partially contained during Reconstruction, was unconstrained in the old South afterwards. A conservative Supreme Court stocked with racist judges from both the north and south, eviscerated the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment. After the Court’s 1886 ruling in Court's 1886 ruling in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, it was "well settled" that "corporations are persons within the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.” By the time the “separate but equal doctrine” emerged from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Ian Milhiser lamented, the promise of “a nation that afforded basic rights to all of its citizens was largely a dead letter.” The “Redeemers” of the South had won, codifying white supremacy under Jim Crow for a hundred years after Lincoln’s death.
But 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought statutory segregation to an end, the Obama years ushered in that new birth of freedom. President Obama didn’t just shape and lead an expansion of civil rights for all Americans. Like Lincoln, he saved the nation. The economy is growing, the private sector has created jobs for 75 months in a row, unemployment has been halved and the value of the stock market more than doubled since the day Obama first took the oath of office. Together, the steps Presidents Bush and Obama took to bailout Chrysler and GM saved the U.S. auto industry and with it, millions of jobs. Obamacare had enabled 23 million Americans to obtain health insurance, reducing the uninsured rate to record lows, rescuing millions from crushing medical bills and ultimately helping to lower income inequality. It’s no wonder some are calling Barack Obama “the most successful Democrat since FDR.”
Now that Donald Trump has grabbed the presidency, many of Obama’s achievements are at risk. The Supreme Court and the judiciary could be lost for a generation, and with them, the framework of legal precedents supporting voting rights, abortion rights, environmental protection, and business regulation could be jeopardized. Obamacare may or may not repealed. But as Jonathan Chait argues in his new book, Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail, Obama has set a new baseline for health care, climate change policy, and economic policy that will be difficult to roll back in Washington or can be countered in the states.
Regardless, the Obama legacy can sustain the coming blows and rebound. Time is on his side. To borrow from Frederick Douglass, viewed from the progressive purist ground, Mr. Obama seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined. Barack Obama may have come to office with grudging respect for Ronald Reagan, who “changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” But our 44th president of the United States has left office as a natural successor to the 16th.
As George W. Bush would say, “Ultimately, history will judge.” No doubt, many Americans today won’t see Obama as Lincoln’s heir. But that will begin to change, and soon. In five years or 10 years from now, many of Obama’s critics and detractors will say, “We were blind; we see that now.”