Thomas Bray, writing for Detroit News, has written a very interesting article comparing the actions and criticisms of Abraham Lincoln to those of our modern president, George W. Bush:

The President “lied” us into war. Much of the pre-war intelligence was wrong. The civilian defense chief was detested as “brusque, domineering and unbearably unpleasant to work with.” Civil liberties were abridged. And many embittered Democrats, claiming the war had been an utter failure, demanded that the administration bring the troops home.

George Bush? Well, yes - but also a President who looms far larger in American history, Abraham Lincoln. One is struck by the parallels in reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln repeatedly asserted that his aim was to prevent the spread of slavery, not eliminate it in the South. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so,” Goodwin quotes him as saying. Thus when he finally issued his Emancipation Proclamation two years into the war, freeing the slaves in the Confederate states, his Northern critics claimed that he had misled the country. A bloody and unnecessary war was being fought in a Utopian effort to bring the blessings of democracy to a people who had little experience with it.

-Snip-

After the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Secretary of State William Seward, Lincoln’s closest advisor, predicted the war would be over in 60 days. Lincoln called on the states for only 75,000 troops - who promptly got whipped at a place called Bull Run.
And as the casualties mounted - 23,000 would die or be wounded on both sides in the Battle of Antietam - the civilian chiefs, including Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, were the subject of fierce criticism.

The criticism, moreover, came not from a retired general flogging his memoirs but from the active duty commander himself, Gen. George McClellan. McClellan, a media hero who referred to Lincoln as “the original gorilla” and once kept him waiting at his headquarters while he took a nap, had a familiar complaint: Washington wasn’t giving him enough troops to do the job.

With the support of the “Peace Democrats,” McClellan wound up running for President in 1864. Lincoln won by 400,000 votes and a landslide in the Electoral College, but it could have gone the other way. Before Sherman took Atlanta in early September, signaling that the war was winnable after all, Lincoln, an excellent political nose-counter, had predicted he would be reelected - but only by three electoral votes.

No, Bush is no Lincoln. As Doris Kearns Goodwin makes clear, Lincoln was a rare combination of visionary - his rhetoric may be America’s greatest poetry - and “political genius.” Most, if not all, historians agree that a bloody Civil War was probably inevitable. Iraq bids fair to be the quagmire critics say it is, though its consequence is dwarfed by that of the American Civil War, which, as Goodwin points out, cost the equivalent of five million casualties in proportion to today’s population.

Though I don’t agree with everything Mr. Bray discusses in the above article, modern Americans can clearly see simularities in how Lincoln was treated in political circles - from dissent in his own party, to obstructionism and treason from the Democratic Party, to the negative, denouncing press. This is not an uncommon picture of today’s political world, with the Democratic Party and the mainstream liberal media denouncing President Bush at every turn.

Though George W. Bush has not  superceded his executive power under the constitution as Lincoln did (destroying slavery as an institution or suspending habeus corpus without explicit authority from Congress), Mr. Bush has enjoyed the fractioning of his own Republican Party, while tolerating the political war-mongering tactics of the liberal Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party of today often resembles a faction of the Democratic Party in the 1860s called the Copperheads. Having the mindset of today’s liberal left, the Copperheads blatantly opposed the Civil War, often arguing for total peace, even if that peace led to a continuous union of Confederate states. They viewed President Lincoln as a tyrant, explaining Lincoln mislead the nation into a war meant to abolish slavery and blamed him for sacrificing the lives of millions of young soldiers. The Copperheads called for the Democratic Party to assume power in Washington, blaming Lincoln and his Republicans for destorying American values though many “despotic” actions. The Copperhead press was no less brutal, calling Lincoln a liar and “despotic” leader who would be hung or shot for his actions (read more here).

Though George W. Bush is continuously attacked by Democratic Party hacks or liberal politicians, many believe he has done right by denouncing terrorism and surprising his critics. Like Lincoln, only history can judge if George W. Bush has done the right thing or is a leader of historical proportions.

George W. Bush: Modern War President