Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Prior to and after President Barack Obama’s inauguration, the president had been compared to Abe Lincoln: Both were from Illinois; both had a rough start in life; the Great Emancipator – a Republican, by the way – has done his best to make possible the election to the presidency of the nation’s first African American; so Lincoln and Obama were, some in the press said, bookends of a kind, one opening the struggle against slavery and the other closing it. All this is true. And we all should be glad whenever the nation is able to shuck off the tattered remnants of a debilitating Jim-Crow politics. It has been a long time coming. Lincoln, had he been alive in our day, would have rejoiced. At this point – so it seems to some of us – it only remains for the president now to decide whether he wishes to be Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, with whom he’s also been compared. Some have also seen in Obama a likeness to President Jack Kennedy. I have no doubt that someone will come along in the near ...