The old battle between Time and Newsweek is back on as the two magazines try to outdo each other in celebrating Barack Obama on their covers.
Time says Barack Obama is FDR, complete with a photo illustration of the president-elect in an open-topped car with cigarette holder. Newsweek upped the ante with a cover on which Obama’s shadow grows into a likeness of Abraham Lincoln.
Finally, an Obama debate that energizes the Washington media bigs: Is the still un-inaugurated 44th president more in the mold of the Great Emancipator or the father of the New Deal.
I smell a panel discussion at the Brookings Institute: “Barack Obama – America’s Greatest President Elect?” Michael Beschloss could moderate and argue the affirmative all at once.
If media folks really wanted to help Obama as much as Chris Matthews says he does, they might do better to manage expectations rather inflate them.
Time is probably closer to the mark with FDR in that Obama is coming to power after an unpopular Republican president and promising additional government intervention in an economic crisis. This is so far a crisis of confidence, rather than a major disruption.
But the theme, if not the scale, is on point. Today, a modern urbanite decides to drink Maxwell House at home rather than a macchiato at Starbucks instead of unemployed masses standing on a chow line.
But the Obamaphiles at Newsweek and elsewhere have clearly placed their bets on Lincoln. It’s got some nice parallels – both elected from Illinois, both short on national experience when they ran for office, both tied to the heart of the issue of race in America, and both surprisingly effective politicians who were underestimated by their foes.
But Lincoln came to office amid rancor and at the moment of greatest peril in the nation’s history, having been elected by a slim plurality while the country was splitting at the seams over the expansion of slavery.
His tenuous hold on power was based on keeping together a coalition of former Whigs who believed that the union was sacred but weren’t opposed to the preservation of slavery in the south and Republicans who were aflame over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and wanted total abolition or at least the end of the expansion of slavery in the west.
After his surprise nomination and election, Lincoln consolidated power by stacking his cabinet with men he defeated at the Republican convention in Chicago – real political heavyweights like New York senator and former Gov. William Seward as secretary of state, Pennsylvania Sen. Simon Cameron as secretary of war, and Ohio Gov. Salmon P. Chase as treasury secretary.
It is this approach, so perfectly explained in Doris Kerns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, that the president-elect’s team is so keen to imitate.
When it was allowed to bubble up that Obama and Hillary Clinton were waltzing around the question of the New York Senator and former rival serving as secretary of state, the Obama-as-Lincoln crowd was in ecstasy.
This may all turn out to be mere kabuki in which the offer was made with the knowledge that it would be declined, sparing both Obama and Clinton the endless speculation over her right role in the prospective Obama Administration.
But if it were to come to pass that Clinton would succeed Condoleezza Rice at State, that wouldn’t amount to a team of rivals, would it?
That would be more like one rival stuck in Foggy Bottom running the nations ungainly foreign service bureaucracy and jetting off to Burkina Faso when the local potentate expires. Obama would conduct his own foreign policy as presidents increasingly have done since the advent of the trans-Atlantic cable.
While Obama gets on the video uplink with the Chinese premier, Hillary can be part of a panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland on the use of biofuels in the Third World.
Elected by a clear majority and with strong support from a unified party, Obama is not in Lincoln’s position of having to hold a coalition together in the midst of a house dividing itself.
Obama doesn’t need a team of rivals. He can instead choose discreet loyalists for key positions.
Consider the notion of bland Eric Holder for attorney general. Lincoln chose Edward Bates — an opponent for the Republican nomination from the slave state of Missouri who fought Lincoln on key policy points — for his attorney general, not a functionary from a previous administration.
Holder looks more like Alberto Gonzales than Bates.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected]
