Ever since I read the book, and ever since I heard Obama was a fan, I’ve had this knot in the pit of my stomach, this silent scream building inside of me, waiting for some external validation that what I was feeling was correct. Today I got it on the Op-Ed page of The Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/...
More after the jump...
What the romanticists fail to recognize is that today’s Republican Party is a party whose sole mission is to win at ANY cost. (And, apparently, so it was back in Lincoln’s day. But most people have Eisenhower in mind when they think of Republican Party and honor in the same sentence.) They repeatedly have put Party over Country (as well as self-interest over Party), and have proved that they can’t be trusted, and Obama shouldn’t trust them until they have done major penance. Reaching across the aisle, as it were, doesn’t mean you bare your throat. Have all the Republican advisors you want, I would say to the President-Elect, but don’t put any of them in a position to have the power to embarrass you and undermine your agenda. You can’t treat a cancerous tumor by leaving any of the cancer cells behind...
The money shot:
Though Seward, the former New York senator who had been the Republican front-runner, eventually proved helpful to the president, the impact of repeated disloyalty and unnecessary backroom drama from him and several other Cabinet officers was a significant factor in the early failures of the Union war effort.
By December 1862, there was a full-blown Cabinet crisis.
"We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln confided to a close friend after being deluged with congressional criticism and confronted by resignations from both Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Goodwin suggests that Lincoln's quiet confidence and impressive emotional intelligence enabled him to survive and ultimately forge an effective team out of his former rivals, but that's more wishful thinking than serious analysis.
Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.
Simon Cameron was the disgraced rival, Lincoln's failed first secretary of War. Goodwin essentially erased him from her group biography, not mentioning him in the book's first 200 pages, even though he placed third, after Seward and Lincoln, on the first Republican presidential ballot. Cameron proved so corrupt and inept that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives censured him after he was removed from office in 1862.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don’t doubt that Robert Gates is an honorable man. He wouldn’t be the issue with me. It’s the rest of the Bush Administration appointees that serve under him that are the issue. The Number 1 Thing that distinguished the Obama Campaign from the McCain campaign was that Obama’s campaign was tighter than a drum, while McCain’s leaked like a sieve. The last thing Obama needs while carrying out his promise to end the occupation of Iraq is a Defense Department filled with Bu$hCo loyalists leaking any and every potentially embarrassing bit of information, while contextual or not, to a willing and schadenfreude-addicted Defense Contractor-Owned press (Yes, I’m thinking GE.) And just imagine what it would do for the bottom line over at Faux News...