American Mythstory¹
So apparently the future President read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, and decided that he would model his cabinet after Abraham Lincoln’s first cabinet.
Abraham Lincoln was a great President and politician, but that was in spite of what happened with his cabinet. Matthew Pinsker fills in a few of the gaps, the little things that Ms. Goodwin left out of her book. The book isn’t quite in Harry Turtledove territory, more along the lines of George Washington and the cherry tree.
I personally preferred the biography, Lincoln by David Herbert Donald which is a more truthful telling of Lincoln’s story and the story of his cabinet.
If you are trying to house break a puppy, you don’t give it a treat when it goes in the middle of carpet, or it never learns not to go on the carpet. In politics you don’t reward your opponents and ignore your friends. This talk about putting Republicans in important posts, and letting LIEberman continue to chair one of the most important committees in the Senate is a slap in the face to people who supported Barack Obama. It says there is no penalty for opposing the Obama administration and no reward for backing it. As one of the 300 million owners of the White House, I would prefer that someone be hired to house break the new puppy – the new President doesn’t seem to understand the necessary principle involved.
1. The original name of Chris Regan’s site which is now called Mass Historia. It’s good for a laugh, unlike Doris Kearns Goodwin.
13 comments
“more along the lines of George Washington and the cherry tree.”
“Mythstory”? How about a story so old it’s “cherryatric”?
I am just not a bipartisan sort of guy. It’s not that I’m always enthusiastic about the Democratic Party; you’ve seen my reservations on display. But after the last eight years, I’ve grown to distrust the GOP so thoroughly, and with such good cause, that I do not even want to work with them. Perhaps Dems could take a page from their book and hold a few dozen congressional committee meetings without bothering to tell the GOPers where and when the meetings take place. That I would even suggest this is an indication of how frustrated I am.
And I don’t care who does it, but somebody has to housebreak a few puppies… starting immediately. There isn’t much time.
Perhaps 30 years ago this would have been possible and desirable, but not after Gingrich and DeLay. This new batch of Republicans resemble Dixiecrats more than Everett Dirksen or Nelson Rockefeller. They don’t believe in government, so it is foolish to give them any more access to the levers of power than is absolutely necessary.
Obama arrived too late for Bill Frist’s “nuclear option” on cloture. It’s almost as if he wasn’t paying attention to the first 6 years of the Hedgemony. Did he miss the fact that it was the Republicans in the House that destroyed the McCain campaign ploy over the bail-out? They made McCain look like a fool, rushing back to Washington for nothing. They won’t compromise because they don’t have to. They know how to be an opposition party, and they will do everything they can to block anything the Democrats attempt.
This nasty attitude is why the Republicans are disappearing from New England and other areas. There are almost no moderate Republicans left.
Secretary of War Stanton was a real work in Lincoln’s cabinet. If he could have gotten away with declaring himself dictator, he would have. Stanton was a Democrat, BTW. But fervently — some say insanely — against secession by the South, and considered anybody on the Southern side who’d been for secession as a traitor fit only to be hung.
If Lincoln had not been assassinated, this would have caused a real problem, because Lincoln did not in any way agree with Stanton’s views of what should happen to the South after the end of the war. But so it goes…
– Badtux the History Penguin
But Stanton was a step up from the man he replaced, Simon Cameron, who had major ethics problems and could remember what belonged to the country and what belonged to him. No doubt Ted Stevens had a portrait of Cameron in his office as they had a lot in common.
Stanton and Thaddeous Stevens were real whackos who made the entire process of peace much more difficult to achieve. The US has never been very good about winning the peace.
Great links! Things are looking sideways…
I really don’t understand why anyone thought that Obama was liberal or progressive. I rejected both Obama and Clinton early on from consideration as they had more in common with moderate Republicans that Democrats.
I voted for Edwards in the primary, before Obama told Florida Democrats that they didn’t count and I left the party after 44 years. Progressives don’t disenfranchise voters.
Nothing he has ever done suggests that he will be a liberal. I think too many liberal Democrats looked at the “color of skin” and not “the content of his character” when deciding to support him.
I’m still waiting for something progressive to happen, but I’m not holding my breath.
from frederick’s link —
And if Obama really wanted change, if he really wanted to honor progressives who backed him early on and then did the grunt work against McCain, he’d nominate Dennis Kucinich as Secretary of State.
actually, a real progressive would set up a whole new department and put kucinich at the head of it.
Well, he might surprise us all and actually do something that is not to the right of Bill Clinton, but I’m beginning to doubt it.
The main reason I voted for Obama is that McCain was more dangerous to the republic. I’m neither particularly proud of my vote nor particularly enthusiastic about Obama; I just have a commitment to vote strategically for the candidate I think will do the least damage.
This was all a great deal more fun when I was young…
obama has all along been making noises that indicate he’d like to be fdr2.0, but he keeps surrounding himself with all the wrong people if he wants to actually implement a new new deal.
After the primary, there wasn’t much choice left thanks to the entrenched two party system. You take your chances with what is there. I opted for a third party, but knew that people were already projecting their belief onto Obama and not listening to him. I don’t blame Obama, he wasn’t hiding who and what he represented. It was the Obamaniacs who distorted reality, not the candidate.
You would have to wonder who he thinks FDR was, Hipparchia. He has a misconception of Lincoln, so I think he has an idealized view of FDR. FDR was very free form. He would try anything, but dumped it if he didn’t think it was working. He was a very performance-based manager. He had idea people feeding him ideas, and always had multiple alternate ready if something failed to produce results. He has been pictured as some kind of genius with a clear vision of what needed to be done, when he was actually the ultimate pragmatist, willing to do whatever it took.
well, those are some of the things obama’s been projecting [under the high-flying hope-and-change rhetoric] — that he’s a pragmatist, ready to listen to and use other people’s ideas, willing to lean populist if we’ll hold his feet to the fire and demand it of him… some other things too iirc, but i could be misremembering some of them. this campaign has in fact sounded very like fdr’s first campaign if you only read obama’s words [in general, without parsing them too strictly], and not those of his fan base.
so yeah, i do think he wants to go down in history as the next fdr. the problem as i see it though, is that it looks like he’s got the process figured out, but that the ideas he wants to try first will be clintonian, with probably a slight rightward lean. imnsho, though, it’s the prescription [keynes, baby! keynes!] that saved us that first time, more than the process, and i’m not at all sure obama sees it that way.
the truly scary thought, the one i don’t let slither to my forebrain very often, is that obama may even buy into that whole it was really ww2 that ended the depression.
Recessions and Depressions end when people start to believe in the future and begin spending to make it happen. The key to Keynes is getting money to the people who will spend it and start the circulation of the economy moving. There is no point in producing anything, if there is no money to buy.
This one is going to be worse than others because there is no “cushion” in the system. Too many have no savings and have used all of their available credit. They have no choice but to stop spending.
If the Hedgemony hadn’t restricted its revenue with the unjustified tax cuts and increased its spending at the same time, this wouldn’t have been as bad as it is. All of those T-bills to finance the deficits have soaked up a lot of the available credit, so there is less real money in circulation. Anything they could do wrong, they did do wrong. This was Reaganomics on steroids.