He was home, in a way, and among friends. Last Thursday evening, standing before the 102nd Abraham Lincoln Association banquet in Springfield, Ill., President Obama recalled Lincoln's words on leaving the state capital for Washington: "To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything." Then he told a wittier, and perhaps more revealing, story. A favor-seeker once came to Lincoln claiming that his efforts had made the crucial difference in the 1860 election.

"So you think you made me president?" Lincoln asked.

"Yes," the man said, "under Providence, I think I did."

"Well," replied Lincoln, "it's a pretty mess you've gotten me into." A pause. "But I forgive you."

Obama's crowd loved it, and he could not help adding: "So whoever of you think you are responsible for this"—his own presidency—"we're taking names."

In a series of pieces this week, we explore the truth behind Obama's humor. There was an impression—not from Obama, to be clear, who took pains to try to manage expectations from Grant Park through the inaugural—that the Kingdom of God was at hand, but reality has a way of intruding, and it has wasted no time in doing so. Little wonder, then, that the president was thinking about taking names in Springfield.

The foregoing point—that Obama's opening weeks have been roiled by perennial political forces and a particularly horrible economic situation—has been made early and often. What has been less remarked upon, and little noted, is the debate we explore this week in an essay by Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. What if partisanship is in fact a good thing? "The president's familiar pining for … consensus expresses in part his desire to get his own way, of course, and as a liberal Democrat his way is itself partisan," Yuval notes. "But it also reaches back to an ancient republicanism that condemned parties in politics as a means by which permanent factions pursued their private interests instead of the public good. For as much as they are beholden to interest groups, however, large modern parties are really giving form to disagreements about the public good. They express a genuine difference of opinion about what is best for the whole." In other essays on the topic, Joseph Epstein explores the nature of political disappointment, and Jonathan Alter charts the demise of what he calls "the purple dream."

In our cover, Mary Carmichael offers perhaps the best news I have heard since the economy began to collapse last autumn: it turns out that stress—defined officially as the hormonal response to danger, uncertainty or change—may actually be good for us. (If so, I suspect you are thinking, then your longevity is assured.) Predictably, scientists disagree about the utility of stress, but Mary notes that the idea of what is called "good stress" is winning more adherents in the medical world. "In the short term," Mary writes, "it can energize us … In the long term, stress can motivate us to do better at jobs we care about. A little of it can prepare us for a lot later on, making us more resilient. Even when it's extreme, stress may have some positive effects—which is why, in addition to posttraumatic stress disorder, some psychologists are starting to define a phenomenon called posttraumatic growth." At this juncture, it would be too glib to link Obama to the stress cover, so I will resist.

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