John Kerry as Abe Lincoln?

[Note: Today it is my pleasure to introduce a new blogger at Democracy Project, John C. "Chuck" Chalberg. Chuck teaches American history at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. He's the author of Emma Goldman: American Individualist, a volume in the Library of American Biography series, and of Rickey and Robinson: The Preacher, the Player, and America's Game, a dual biography of baseball greats Branch Rickey and Jackey Robinson. To boot, he performs one-man shows as Teddy Roosevelt, G.K. Chesterton, H.L. Mencken, and Branch Rickey. Welcome, Chuck! Winfield Myers]

John Kerry as Abe Lincoln? Well, why not. After all, since November 2nd much has been made of the connections between the blue states and the states that Lincoln carried in 1860 and 1864. The parallels are there, superficial though they may be. Both are height and hair-advantaged. Both are angular and craggy-faced. Both had brief and somewhat controversial war records. And both married up. Because Kerry managed that feat twice, it’s also the case that when each man ran for president he was saddled with a wife who could most charitably be described as a loose cannon. That about covers it.

Oh yes, there is this allegedly not too small matter of the northern tier states (minus Ohio) that Lincoln and Kerry won 140 years apart. On the face of it, this parallel cannot be denied. And had Kerry carried Ohio the parallel would have been complete come January 20, 2005 and the inauguration of another tall, well-thatched, and well-lined president.

Among the northern Lincoln-Kerry states is our own Minnesota. Ah, we Minnesotans can crow, at least we did the right thing—thrice! After all, Lincoln took the state twice and Kerry once. With confidence, not to mention condescension, we can take pride in knowing that, while the country erred on November 2nd, we voted for the Lincoln in this race. If only that were true . . .

The painful truth is that the parallel works better the other way. Let’s begin with a seeming superficiality: the baboon and the chimp. To the east coast elite of the 1850s—and 1860s—Abe Lincoln was just that, a “baboon.” He was a rough-hewn, ill-educated interloper from the west who was embarrassingly out of his element in polite society. What’s the title of one of those innumerable anti-Bush websites? Smirkingchimp.com. And who looks down on this ignorant cowboy but that same east coast elite (that now has a bookend on the other coast)?

To be sure, this country’s IS (intellectual snob) quotient was much smaller back then, but the ISers of the 1850s—and 1860s—were generally anti-Lincoln. And they were essentially Democratic. After all, how could really smart folks be comfortable in a party filled with religious yahoos who thought that such things as slavery and booze ought to be reigned in, if not eliminated. No one talked of the religious right or left in the middle of the 19th century, but no one doubted that evangelical religion was the engine that drove the Republican party.

Come 1864 those same really smart Democrats thought it would be a bright idea to run a military man against President Lincoln. John Kerry meet George McClellan. Actually, if Lt. John F. Kerry could be compared with any Lincoln-era political figure, it would be Gen. George C. McClellan. A similar comparison might be made between the Democratic party of 1864 and the Democrats of 2004.

In 1864 the Democrats ran a general whom Lincoln had fired on a platform that promised to restore the Union and preserve slavery. In doing so, they claimed to be spurning the cut-and-run wing of their party, namely the Peace Democrats who were prepared to let the South go. But why would the South have wanted to go, if it could retain its “peculiar institution.” In 2004 Kerry managed a similar trick. He silenced dovish Democrats, while claiming that he would fight the war in Iraq more diligently and, of course, more intelligently. Would he have done so? Or would he have abandoned what he called the “wrong war.” Who knows?

The best guess is that a President Kerry would have taken the latter route, and sooner rather than later, because that course was (and remains) the preference of most Democrats, most especially the elites on each coast. And pleasing elites was as important to John Kerry as it was to George McClellan (who, by the way, lost the soldier vote as badly as Kerry did).

Lincoln, on the other hand, persevered in the face of ceaseless scorn from the elites (some within his own party) of his day. And because he persevered the Union was saved and slavery was abolished. As a result, it would not be too much to say that the North (Minnesota included) saved this country in the middle of the 19th century.

At the moment, Bush is persevering as well. Whether the issue is Iraq or abortion or stem cell research, he is persevering in the face of ferocious scorn from elites everywhere. Like Lincoln, George Bush was never an altar boy. Like Lincoln, Bush came to be a man of faith later in his life. How could the president who used his Second Inaugural Address to tell his fellow countrymen that the Civil War was God’s punishment for the sin of slavery not have been a man of religion?

Lincoln’s commitment to ending slavery grew stronger as he grew older—and as he grew more religious. But his opposition to slavery was always there. “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” said the Lincoln of the 1850s. Slavery must be put on the road to “ultimate extinction,” stated Lincoln in his debates with Stephen Douglas.

George Bush has been less than Lincolnian in his statements on abortion. But he has been much more Lincolnian than Kerry on this great moral issue of our day. And no one knows that better than his pro-choice enemies who fear that chipping away at the right to an abortion will set it on the road to ultimate extinction. Kerry, altar boy or no, sounds like one of those mealy-mouthed southerners (and northerners) whose position on slavery was “personally opposed, but . . .”

A democratic Iraq is a long way off. So is a peaceful and generally prosperous Middle East. The same can be said about any reversal of Roe v Wade. Victory over the Confederacy and an end to slavery were much, much closer in 1864 than any of the above is in 2004. And yet, if President Bush perseveres as Lincoln did, all of that and more might someday transpire. If so, it might someday be said that the South, and not the North, saved America during the course of the 21st century.