What Obama can learn from Lincoln
President-elect Barack Obama speaks at 'We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration At The Lincoln Memorial' January 18, 2009 in Washington, DC.
/ Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images
This post originally appeared on Slate.
Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is so lush you feel like you're watching it in a velvet chair. The dark parlors and White House meeting rooms are full of fire and cigar smoke. The Lincoln played by Daniel Day Lewis seems so familiar it reminds you of the first time you heard him, except of course you never have. But after my wife and I watched the film, her first reaction was to say this: "I kept thinking about health care." She wasn't talking about the gritty scene at an Army hospital. She was talking about the Affordable Care Act.
At the center of the film is Lincoln's fight to find the votes to pass the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, and though the bloody and muddy war scenes make the stakes quite clear, at its heart the movie is a math problem: How does Lincoln get two-thirds of the tick marks on the vote tally sheet to go his way? That's how a story about ending the enslavement of an entire race can remind you of health care reform. The math is the same in all big legislative fights: How hard do you push to get what is right when pushing too hard can spoil the whole enterprise? Not all legislative fights have the same moral weight. In much of the film, you see the tonnage in Lincoln's face and his hands and his walk, but when it comes to the legislation, while Lincoln captures the nuts and bolts, it lacks that heft.
President Obama has seen Spielberg's film and is a fan of the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, Team of Rivals, upon which it is based. Screenwriter Tony Kushner has said Obama liked it. So it makes you wonder what lessons a newly re-elected president with a gift for oratory might take from it, especially when our own president faces his own fight with a lame duck Congress.
The first lesson is that great oratory doesn't get you votes. The movie starts and ends with Lincoln's famous speeches. First, a hokey scene in which Union soldiers parrot the Gettysburg address back to its author and then a final scene depicting Lincoln's second inaugural address. But the main drama--the hunt for votes--has almost nothing to do with the president's power of public persuasion. In the scenes where Lincoln tries to convince individual lawmakers, he is forgettable (an amazing achievement for Day-Lewis, who is so spectacular that even his labored footfalls seem meaningful).
The next lesson is not one available to our current president: Votes are for sale. At the start of the film, Lincoln is faced with trying to secure two kinds of votes: conservative Republicans and a smaller number of Democrats who have been voted out of office in the election of 1864 but who can still vote in the lame duck session. He employs a crew of political hacks who look like Mumford and Sons session men to offer Democrats plum postings after they've left office. This is how Lincoln gets a good share of the hard votes. Vote buying is largely unavailable to the modern president, certainly when it comes to influencing members of the opposite party. Remember how quickly Obama had to back off the Cornhusker Kickback, an attempt to sweeten the health care bill for Democrat Bill Nelson. This points out an immediate caution for anyone trying to draw lessons from this film. A lot has changed. Lincoln's careful strategy employed in this film could not have survived the first tweet.
The more useful skill a modern-day president could mimic is Lincoln's careful management of his allies. He secures conservative Republican votes by stringing the lawmakers along. (This is a crucial presidential attribute also effectively used by FDR.) Lincoln's fellow Republicans will vote for the 13th amendment if he promises to entertain peace entreaties from the South. Lincoln says he will do just that and sends Francis Preston Blair to Richmond to meet with the Confederates. But if word leaks that any conversation with the South is underway, it will sap the energy for passing the amendment, which supporters hope will help bring an end to the war. In one telling scene, a couple petitioning the president say they are for the amendment, but when asked by Secretary of State Seward if they would be for the amendment if the war were over, they lose all interest. Throughout the film, Lincoln simultaneously pushes for the vote while stalling the approach of the Confederate representatives heading North to talk peace. He never quite lies to his allies, but he manages their intake of information so that they hear what they want to hear--and stay in line.
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Lincoln divided the country, states seceded, and Lincoln went to war to stop them from seceding.
Now we have that same scenario........and we would hope, that Obama could learn from the horrible result of Lincoln's actions, that you should not go to war, to gain control over the people.
..this president is WELL versed in all that he does going into his 2nd term as President of the United States. The president doesn't NEED TO LEARN ANYTHING from President Lincoln's legacy in retrospect.
This modern age dynamics is a different time and age than Lincoln's dynamics and tenture.
..if anything-- future US Presidents could learn from President Obama's legacy.