Obama’s Lincoln

The most important quality may be humility, which both Obama and Lincoln repeatedly refer to as an essential virtue. Humility in this case is not to be confused with meekness or passivity. Rather, it comes from confidence. A Lincolnesque leader is confident enough to be humble—to not feel the need to bluster or dominate, but to be sufficiently sure of one's own judgment and self-worth to really listen and not be threatened by contrary advice. Lincoln showed this rare quality before he was sworn into office in March 1861. "Lincoln wrote a really bellicose Inaugural [Address] at home," says Harold Holzer, author of "Lincoln President-Elect." "It ended with looking at the South and saying, 'Shall it be peace or sword?' He showed the draft to people, and they all urged him to tone it down and make it more conciliatory." And so he did. It turns out that the lines quoted by Obama in Grant Park ("We are not enemies, but friends …") were not written by Lincoln, but by Seward.

Obama can be cocky. During the campaign, he liked to appear onstage alone—"the One," as Oprah Winfrey blessed him—without the usual scenes of families and party pooh-bahs and hangers-on. But Obama is self-aware. In his book "The Audacity of Hope," he describes how he rather grandly wrote in the pages of Time magazine, "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles." Recalling the episode, Obama goes on to ruefully note that he was zinged by columnist Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal: "This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better." Writes Obama: "Ouch!"

Obama has unusual detachment for a politician. He observes himself as a kind of figure out of literature. Walking the streets of Springfield, the Illinois state capital, on the day he was speaking at the dedication of the Lincoln library, he "started wondering," as he put it, whether "the poor boy born in the backwoods of Kentucky ever dreamed" that a presidential library would be dedicated in his name—or that it was possible "for a black man [Obama] to speak at that dedication as a United States Senator." As a senator, Obama writes in "Audacity," he liked to jog on warm evenings down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial, where he stood and silently mouthed the words carved in marble.

He writes of going to the White House, of visiting the Lincoln Bedroom: "A modest space with antique furniture, a four-poster bed, an original copy of the Gettysburg Address discreetly displayed under glass—and a big, flat-screen TV set atop one of the desks. Who, I wondered, flipped on 'SportsCenter'while spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom?" At a White House breakfast meeting with some other senators, he describes President Bush as a kind of anti-Lincoln. Dealing with the question of judicial appointments, writes Obama, "the President's eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty."

By contrast, Obama praises Lincoln's "practicality," "that self-awareness, that humility." And yet, apparently without sensing any irony, on the very next page of his book, Obama records how he "declined to be a part of what would be called the Gang of Fourteen." The Gang of 14 was a bipartisan group of senators that tried to break through partisan deadlock over judicial appointments. As a senator, Obama showed a notable unwillingness to take political risks by reaching across the aisle on controversial matters (in contrast to his presidential opponent, John McCain, who routinely sought bipartisan coalitions and was one of the Gang of 14).

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich is a self-described "student of Lincoln" and author of two books on the Civil War. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Gingrich says he has been impressed by Obama's use of Lincoln as a prop. But he is waiting to see if Obama is sincere in his emulation. "Obama's got a liberal voting record, and I don't know of any substantive issue where he's ever broken with his leadership," says Gingrich. Obama has friends across the aisle—including Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana and Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Mentioned as a possible secretary of state, Lugar has hinted that he's not interested (he spoke with Obama last week; the conversation was kept private). Coburn's staff tells NEWSWEEK that he has yet to hear from Obama or anyone on his staff.

Gingrich says an early test of whether Obama is a centrist or beholden to liberal interest groups will come on the "card-check bill." Labor unions want a law that would do away with secret balloting and allow labor organizers to lean on workers to sign a statement demanding a union (the card check). Obama has said he would support such a provision, which would infuriate big business and free marketers. (One prominent Democrat, asking for anonymity to not antagonize organized labor, says that Obama should let the unions have their way on the card-check bill—but only to temporize, to keep the unions from demanding protectionist legislation that would be even more harmful to the economy.)