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I recently finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln opus, “A Team of Rivals”.  Goodwin possesses the ability to mold the dry results of historical research into a flowing narrative- she is a good story teller.  Effusive in her praise of Lincoln’s intelligence, political skill and decent nature, her goal is put the man and his Presidency into focus by drawing contrasts between him and his political competitors. What struck me as I read through the nearly 800-pages were the parallels the events in the years leading up to Lincoln’s election in 1860 have to the present political scene: Lincoln’s Republican Party emerged from the wreckage of the Whigs Party, a party torn apart by regional and ideological differences. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we may now be witnessing the fracturing of that Republican Party’s latter-day descendent along similar fault lines. The 1850’s gave us the anti-immigrant Know Nothings (officially The Native American Party. Ironic that white Protestants adopted the appellation which we now use to describe the peoples from whom we took the land). Virulent anti-immigrant sentiments are also a prominent theme of the current campaign.  As for know-nothings, we have the Tea Party.

The tone of our politics is no more negative today than it was one-hundred-fifty years ago. Lincoln was subject to ad hominem attacks about his appearance (he was often depicted in political cartoons as a monkey), his intellectual abilities and even his clothing. Barack Obama, who chose Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, IL to announce his own Presidential run in 2007, has faced similar vituperation. None of this is novel- George W. Bush’s intellect was frequently called into question by people who’d never met him. Disparagement seems a requisite component of electoral politics.

As been said many times, there’s nothing new under the sun.