What is the difference between abraham lincoln and barack obama

List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Kathy Gill. Politics Expert. Kathy Gill is a former instructor at the University of Washington, a former lobbyist, and spent 20 years working public affairs executive in the natural resources industry. Updated April 01, And they noted that Obama mentioned Lincoln several times during that speech, including in these lines: "Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done.

Today we are called once more - and it is time for our generation to answer that call. For that is our unyielding faith - that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. That's what Abraham Lincoln understood. He had his doubts. He had his defeats. He had his setbacks.

But through his will and his words, he moved a nation and helped free a people. Lincoln as a Role Model Obama also was forced to deflect questions about his lack of national experience , a criticism Lincoln, too, had to fend off. Featured Video. Edited by Tom Murse. Cite this Article Format. Columbia University history professor Eric Foner, also a Lincoln scholar, has said people should take a step back from the comparisons.

But I think, as a historian, people ought to calm down a little about these comparisons," he said. There aren't, I think, a lot of exact direct lessons one can or should necessarily try to learn from Lincoln.

Everybody finds what they want to find in Lincoln. There are dozens of Lincolns out there. So saying 'I'm reading Lincoln or modeling myself on Lincoln' doesn't really tell us a heck of a lot. Historian Ronald White said that both Obama and Lincoln had a "tremendous trust in words and the power of language. It's only words. And yet I think underneath the words are the public's perception of looking for someone with integrity and authenticity and not someone simply playing a role," White said.

White, author of the book "A. He could make things clear, even complicated things clear, to the average person, and I think Obama has that gift, too," he said. If we shift gears from regional polarization to political polarization, Lincoln and Obama once again appear as political doubles. Both made efforts to reach across the aisle. Shortly before his death, he signed a proposed constitutional amendment providing for an end to American slavery—immediately and with no financial compensation to slaveholders.

Nothing like this had ever happened in any American jurisdiction where slavery was widespread. In , all racial disfranchisement was constitutionally forbidden, building on another suggestion made by Lincoln himself in his last public speech, just days before he died. That level of equality had been a new public stance for Lincoln, a break from his more cautious early views, much as Obama has only recently evolved to a position of open embrace of same-sex marriage. Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram.

January 18, Comparing Lincoln's Inauguration to Obama's. Go Back to Posts. Sunday-Saturday am — pm.