Historian discusses Obama's parallels with Lincoln

Almost every president and candidate for the office since Abraham Lincoln has invoked the 16th president to further their aims, but none has done it more frequently or successfully than Barack Obama, a Lincoln scholar says.

Harold Holzer, who has traced the history of presidents cloaking themselves in Lincoln's legacy, discussed how Obama has done the best job of it and offered parallels between the two leaders in a lecture Wednesday at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville to mark Black History Month and Lincoln's birthday.

The author, co-author or editor of 33 books on Lincoln and the Civil War era told a standing-room crowd of more than 200 that politicians' efforts to ride Lincoln's coattails began soon after his 1865 assassination that elevated him to beloved icon status.

Speaking of Obama, the Little Neck native said, "No president has more successfully summoned Lincoln."

Despite being leaders of opposing parties, the two leaders have much in common, said Holzer, co-chairman of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. "Both wrote bestselling books," he noted. The Lincoln-Douglas debate transcripts that Lincoln arranged to have published flew off the shelves.

After Obama's election, "he replicated Lincoln's train journey to Baltimore and Washington" for the inauguration. "Mr. Obama made a point of swearing the oath of office on the very same Bible."

Obama dedicated his inauguration to Lincoln and served the same inauguration day dinner menu.

"Both tapped their onetime chief [party] rival for secretary of state," Holzer said. And both secretaries of state were senators from New York: William Seward and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Both were very cool under pressure," he said of the presidents, who also took heat for promoting unpopular causes, Holzer said. For Lincoln, it was the Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves in states that were fighting the Union. Obama is under fire for health care reform.

Initially, Holzer said, it was other Republicans who tried to connect themselves to Lincoln. But Democratic presidential candidates in the early 20th century, starting with William Jennings Bryan, tried to identify with Lincoln as well, sometimes outdoing the Republicans.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first Democrat to campaign for the black vote, was one good example.

The lecture was well received. Leila Baum, a sixth-grader from Word Christian Academy in Cambria Heights and a history buff, said, "I learned a lot. I didn't know that Teddy Roosevelt kept a lock of Lincoln's hair in his ring."

Matthew Pasternak, a Post freshman history major from Wantagh, said, "He conveyed the sense that Lincoln is the standard of the modern presidency. I agree with his idea that presidents are flawed men, but if they are able to show true leadership, they can make our country better."