2495 Joseph Duggan, Obama in blue and grey, Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

President Obama tonight (February 12) will deliver what all the circumstances indicate should be one of the more memorable epideictic speeches in US history — remarks in Springfield, Illinois, for the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.  
 
I have just published a little essay that challenges Obama and some of the conventional thinking about this.  I suggest that Obama has much in common with Lincoln’s antagonist, Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
 
Among my points:
 
«If the Davos conferences of global politico-economic glitterati had taken place three centuries ago, the Lees [of Virginia] would have felt completely at home.»
 
This article was published yesterday in the local newspaper of the plantation birthplaces of Lee and George Washington.

————————————————————————————

OBAMA IN BLUE AND GREY

February 11, 2009

By Joseph P. Duggan
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

STRATFORD –Westmoreland County, abundant with slave labor, fertile soil, and mild climate ideal for cultivating tobacco, was the seat of great Virginia planters and the birthplace of Washington, Monroe, and a procession of Lees. Today, the sandy loam sustains pastures for dairy cattle and vineyards for vintners offering cheer to tourists making pilgrimage to the estates that spawned statesmen. 
Barack Obama, whom genealogical experts say is a blood relative of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, won 55 percent of the vote in his ancestral county, whose population, unlike many rural Southern counties formerly dominated by plantation slavery, is mostly (65 percent) white.
The Lees were the grandest family of these parts. Their manor house at Stratford, with its terraced lawns and gardens, is a masterpiece of classical symmetry. During the 18th century, sons were sent to the mother country to study Greek and Latin at Oxford and law at the Inns of Court, and to magnify the family wealth by working as tobacco merchants and financiers in the burgeoning center of world trade that was London.
If the Davos conferences of global politico-economic glitterati had taken place three centuries ago, the Lees would have felt completely at home.
A week after his inauguration, President Obama took part in an annual ritual of Washington’s own Davos, the Alfalfa Club Dinner, best known as a showcase for humor. Obama remarked that the event had been established about a century ago as a way to celebrate the Jan. 19 birthday of Gen. Lee. «If he were here with us tonight,» deadpanned the president, «the general would be 202 years old. And very confused.»
How true. The Confederate leader might have understood the standoffishness of his kinsman, the first black commander in chief of the Union. Also understandably, Obama wants to identify himself with Lee’s antagonist, the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.
LIKE LINCOLN–OR LEE?
There are indeed fascinating parallels between the 16th and 44th chief executives, beginning with the launch of their political careers in the state legislature in Springfield, Ill. The confusion starts in the extremes to which Obama, usually a figure respectful of his own authenticity, insists upon portraying himself as the reincarnation of Honest Abe.
Obama announced his candidacy at the Illinois capitol two years ago this week in a speech drenched in Lincolniana–drawing parallel after parallel between «a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer» and You-Know-Who. [For other parallels, see William Lee Miller’s «When All Men Truly Were Created Equal» in the Feb. 8 Viewpoints.]
Tomorrow, Obama will return to Springfield to speak at the dinner commemorating Lincoln’s 200th birthday. It has all the circumstances for one of the great epideictic speeches in American history; yet the occasion may have been marred by Obama’s messianism in marketing himself as the Second Coming of Lincoln.
A more fruitful if also more painful exercise might be for all of us, including the new president, to examine parallels between Obama and Lee.
Lee was a popular public figure because of his personality and personal character. He was handsome and eloquent. His manners were impeccable. Women idolized him as the avatar of legendary knights of chivalry. Before, after, and even during the Civil War, Lee managed to maintain among large sectors of the public an image as a noble leader, somehow transcending partisanship, transcending sectionalism, transcending even the slavery issue.
Slavery was the «peculiar institution» to which many of our 18th-century and 19th-century leaders were «personally opposed.» Yet they were unwilling to uproot it as a foundation of the American economy and way of life.
To know Lee was to love him, yet he bought into the seductions of a culture that congratulated itself on its supposed refinement and gentility when really it was a culture of inhumanity and death. Would anyone dare use these words to describe the moral contradictions of today’s elites on the Upper East Side of New York, or in San Francisco, or in Cambridge or New Haven, or in Chicago’s leafy university quarter of Hyde Park?
A PERVERSE ELEGANCE
Is there not an awful truth in asserting that Lee was, and Barack Obama is, an elegant frontman for the ugliest in American utilitarianism? Nineteenth-century American utilitarians and the wealthy interest groups they supported, the planters and the international bankers and merchants, held that black human beings could and should be owned and utilized as property.
In the 21st century, people who advocate the conception and destruction of human embryos in laboratories for research and profit are like those apologists for slavery. They believe that some human beings can and should be owned and utilized as property for economic gain. 
The equality of all human beings–black and white, African and European–was denied by those who promoted or simply refused to fight against slavery. The equality of all human beings–born and unborn, in the work force or in the womb, in test tubes or in nursing homes or in terminal cancer wards–is denied by those who advocate or tolerate abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem-cell experimentation.
Great leaders have changes of heart. Lincoln’s first inaugural address implored reconciliation with the South and promised to accept the perpetuation of slavery in that region. California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who as president became a committed champion of the right to life of the unborn, signed one of the most pro-abortion state laws known up to that time.
Without doubt, Barack Obama symbolizes and is right to lead us in celebrating Lincoln’s, and America’s, internal struggle and ultimate triumph over slavery. But like most Americans, on the painful social issues that vex us today, Obama–who proclaimed in Springfield two winters ago, «I want us to take up the unfinished business of perfecting our union, and building a better America»–is tinged with a chiaroscuro of the Blue and the Gray.
Joseph Duggan is a former speech writer for President George H.W. Bush and a former foreign-policy adviser in the Reagan administration.
 
http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2009/022009/02112009/445111/printer_friendly