At his campaign-style town hall meeting in Decorah, Iowa, President Obama compared the criticism he has received from Republicans and other political opponents to the troubles faced by President Abraham Lincoln during the civil war. “Lincoln,” the president said, “they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”
The president’s remarks came in response to a question from a woman who said that congressional Republicans are refusing to be a “good partner” to work with the president. “What happens to our democracy?” the woman asked. “We are in a very divided country right now. What can you say to help us with democracy itself?”
Obama told the woman that “democracy is always a messy business in a big country like this.” In addition, he said, “We kind of romanticize sometimes what democracy used to be like.”
“When you listen to what the Federalists said about the Anti-Federalists, and the names that Jefferson called Hamilton and back and forth — I mean those guys were tough,” Obama said. “Lincoln — they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me. So democracy has never been for the faint of heart.”
The president has had historical analogies on his mind lately. At a high-dollar fundraiser in New York City last Thursday, he discussed the difficulties he has faced recently and included a meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr. “I think that we forget when he was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times,” the president said. “There was a decade that followed the great successes of Birmingham and Selma in which he was just struggling, fighting the good fight, and scorned, and many folks angry. But what he understood, what kept him going, was that the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. But it doesn’t bend on its own. It bends because all of us are putting our hand on the arc and we are bending it in that direction. And it takes time. And it’s hard work. And there are frustrations.”
