Sudden modesty from the self-hyperadulated president.
By Bret Stephens
Seven score and 10 years ago,
Abraham Lincoln
delivered his sacred speech on the meaning of free government.
Edward Everett,
a former secretary of state and the principal speaker for the
consecration of the Gettysburg cemetery, instantly recognized the power
of the president's 272 words.
"I should
be glad, if I could flatter myself," Everett wrote to Lincoln the next
day, "that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two
hours, as you did in two minutes."
Barack Obama
is not scheduled to be present at Gettysburg on Tuesday to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of the address. Maybe he figured that
the world would little note, nor long remember, what he said there.
Maybe he thought the comparisons with the original were bound to be
invidious, and rightly so.
If that's the case, it would be the beginning of wisdom for this presidency. Better late than never.
Mr.
Obama's political career has always and naturally inspired thoughts
about the 16th president: the lawyer from Illinois, blazing a sudden
trail from obscurity to eminence; the first black president, redeeming
the deep promise of the new birth of freedom. The associations create a
reservoir of pride in the 44th president even among his political
opponents.
But, then, has there ever been a
president who so completely over-salted his own brand as Barack Obama?
"I never compare myself to Lincoln," the president told NBC's
David Gregory
last year. Except that he announced his presidential candidacy
from the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Ill. And that he
traveled by train to Washington from Philadelphia for his first
inauguration along the same route Lincoln took in the spring of 1861.
And that he twice swore his oaths of office on the Lincoln Bible.
"Lincoln—they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about
me," he said in Iowa in 2011.
No, this has not been a president who has ever shied away from grandiose historical comparisons. If
George W. Bush
reveled in being misunderestimated, Mr. Obama aims to be
self-hyperadulated. "I would put our legislative and foreign policy
accomplishments in our first two years against any president—with the
possible exceptions of Johnson,
FDR,
and Lincoln," the president told "60 Minutes" in 2011. Note the
word possible.
But now that has
started to change. The president has been humbled; he's pleading
incompetence against charges of dishonesty; the media, mainstream as
well as alternative, smell blood in the water.
And
his problems on that score are just beginning: ObamaCare is really a
political self-punching machine, slugging itself with every botched
rollout, missed deadline, postponed mandate, higher deductible, canceled
insurance policy and jury-rigged administrative fix.
John Roberts,
we hardly knew you: Your ObamaCare swing vote last year may yet
turn out to be best gift Republicans have had in a decade.
All
this will force even liberals to reappraise the Obama presidency.
Lincoln's political reputation went from being "the original gorilla"
(as
Edwin Stanton,
his future secretary of war, once called him) to being
celebrated, in the words of
Ulysses Grant,
as "incontestably the greatest man I have ever known." Obama's
political trajectory, and reputation, are headed in the opposite
direction: from Candidate Cool to President Callow.
That
reappraisal is going to take many forms, not least in the international
goodwill Mr. Obama's presidency was supposed to have brought us. But
since the occasion of this column is the Gettysburg sesquicentennial,
it's worth turning to the question of the president's once-celebrated
prose.
Abraham Lincoln spoke greatly
because he read wisely and thought deeply. He turned to
Shakespeare,
he once said, "perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional
reader." "It matters not to me whether Shakespeare be well or ill
acted," he added. "With him the thought suffices."
Maybe Mr. Obama has similar literary tastes. It doesn't show. "An economy built to last,"
the refrain from his 2012 State of the Union, borrows from an ad slogan
once used to sell the Ford Edsel. "Nation-building at home," another
favorite presidential trope, was born in a
Tom Friedman
column. "We are the ones we have been waiting for" is the title
of a volume of essays by
Alice Walker.
"The audacity of hope" is adapted from a
Jeremiah Wright
sermon. "Yes We Can!" is the anthem from "Bob the Builder," a TV
cartoon aimed at 3-year-olds.
There is a
common view that good policy and good rhetoric have little intrinsic
connection. Not so. President Obama's stupendously shallow rhetoric
betrays a remarkably superficial mind. Superficial minds designed
ObamaCare. Superficial minds are now astounded by its elementary
failures, and will continue to be astounded by the failures to come.
Is
there a remedy? Probably not. Then again, the president's no-show at
Gettysburg suggests he might be trying to follow Old Abe's counsel in a
fruitful way: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool," the Great
Emancipator is reported to have said, "than to speak and to remove all
doubt."
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