Which Lincoln is Obama More Like?

Barack Obama is asked often enough about his political inexperience that he has developed standard responses. Sometimes he points out that the experience of the Bush administration’s foreign policy and national security team was no insurance against misguided decisions and mishandled execution. True enough—but mostly irrelevant. Nobody says that experience in any line of work is a guarantee of success, just that, combined with wise policies, it increases the chances of success.

Other times, especially during the February time frame in which Obama declared his candidacy for the presidency, a time frame that also encompasses the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, Obama points to the flip side of the relationship between previous experience and presidential success: the fact that the man who was one of the least experienced men ever to become president, Abraham Lincoln, turned out to be, one of the greatest.

There’s something to the comparison—more, in fact, than may be good for Obama’s cause.

Lincoln’s experience was roughly comparable to Obama’s. A few years in the Illinois state legislature, a few years in the practice of law, a failed candidacy for congressional office—the Senate for Lincoln, the House of Representatives for Obama—and two years of service in Congress. And despite his inexperience, Lincoln did turn out to be a great president and a great man.

The bad news is that, although Lincoln’s years in office eventually brought out his greatness instead of destroying him and ruining the country, before he became a great president, he was, arguably, a bad president-elect and a bad president. at a time when the country desperately needed strong leadership.

As president-elect, with just a few months of Washington experience (Congress met for just a few months each term when Lincoln served in the House), he offered the War Department of a country on the brink of civil war to the notoriously corrupt Simon Cameron. Realizing his mistake soon after Cameron left Springfield, Lincoln tried to persuade him to withdraw, failed, and found himself unable to deny him the job. Only after more than a year during which Cameron’s corruption burdened the war effort could Lincoln bring himself to oust him.

His term as president started inauspiciously. Three months prior to his inauguration, a South Carolina militia had blocked reinforcement of the U.S. Army’s Fort Sumter, and the crisis had not been resolved when Lincoln took the oath of office.

Lincoln was not prepared for this emergency [writes David Herbert Donald is his biography of Lincoln]…as he freely admitted later, when he became President “he was entirely ignorant not only of the duties, but of the manner of doing the business” in the executive office…There was no one to teach him rules and procedures, and he made egregious mistakes…The new President allowed office-seekers to take up most of his time…The news from Fort Sumter forced this inexperienced and overworked administrator to make a hard choice…With his advisors divided, Lincoln was unable to reach a decision.

Lincoln ultimately reached the right decision, to rescue the beleaguered Sumter. But as the war spread, with his leadership experience limited to a few months as a militia captain in the Black Hawk War in the 1840s, Lincoln found it almost impossible in the early months and years of the Civil War, to exert his authority over the Army, and difficult to goad his commanding general, George B. McClellan, into action. In fact, by the time Lincoln finally turned command over to Ulysses Grant in late 1863, more than two years into the war, he had fired McClellan, re-hired him, and fired him again.

By that time, of course, a combination of Lincoln’s greatness and more than a year of on-the-job training had had its effect. Lincoln had established his mastery over men like William Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edwin Stanton who had assumed themselves his superior. He had finally found a general, Grant, who could win. The War was won.

It would be simple-minded to predict that a President Obama would be doomed by his inexperience to a first few months as difficult as Lincoln’s, almost as simple-minded as it is for Obama to suggest airily that Lincoln’s precedent should banish concerns about Obama’s own inexperience. In fact, Obama and Lincoln have little in common, other than their pre-presidential inexperience and the fact that they both represented Illinois in Congress and that neither was native to the state. Although Obama has little experience in politics, he has attended the nation’s finest schools, unlike the self-taught Lincoln. There are inter-presidential transition periods now, so that new presidents can hit the ground running.

It is not unfair, however, to suggest that Obama bears the burden of proof—the risk of non-persuasion, an old law school professor of mine used to call it—of demonstrating that he is capable enough that his inexperience augurs fresh perspectives and fresh policies instead of rookie mistakes. He bears the burden of proof, in other words, that he can be both a capable candidate and a capable president.