First, allow me to confess, I’ve been reading my dog-eared copy of Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition recently, and all due credit to Hofstadter, the publisher and any interested heirs. Hofstadter’s tome is without comparison in political writing and I have borrowed liberally here from his chapter on Abraham Lincoln. Though brief, Hofstadter’s treatment of Lincoln provides a searing account of that man’s life, that is equally compassionate and reverential. And unlike Doris Kearn Goodwin’s more recent, A Team Of Rivals, where Lincoln arrives to us almost fully formed, Hofstadter illuminates every step of Lincoln’s excruciating path to our nation’s highest office and fleshes out the sins of a man we now tend to view as pure as driven snow.

Also, and perhaps because Hofstadter’s tome had jogged my thoughts of late, I decided to throw my copy of The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart on the old turntable the other night. Surely someone out there still owns a copy? And remembers the Abraham Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue shtick?

“Abe, sweetie,” Newhart starts out on the phone. “How’s things in Gettysburg?” and you’re falling out of your chair. In reference to the infamous address, Newhart, the ostensible marketing guru grows abject. “Aw Abe, now why do you always go and change the speeches?” Then flustered, “You’re wondering why four score and seven years… It, it doesn’t make any sense to you... Abe, just trust me on this one. We test marketed that line in Peoria. They loved it.”

And if test marketing the Gettysburg Address isn’t funny, I don’t know what is…

But to my point, Newhart’s good-hearted jibing got me to thinking about the lofty way in which we venerate Lincoln in our society and to wonder how our 16th President would have held up in today’s world of endless media scrutiny. Not very well, I think. Abe didn’t do so well in his own time. Between the yoke of a civil war, the dragging of his feet on the issue of slavery and the general tendency of Lincoln’ enemies to portray him as a country oaf, you wonder how we ever arrived at a place where, as Hofstadter put it, “The Lincoln legend has come to have a hold on the American imagination that defies comparison with anything else in political mythology.” Simply stated, when we refer to the man in public discourse, we tend to do so in a way that is utterly devoid of analysis.

The truth about Lincoln is, whether or not he intended to run for President from the start, his entire adult life was guided by a singular ambition: that of securing public office. As William H. Herndon put it, a man who was familiar with Lincoln and apparently adored him greatly, “Politics were his life, newspapers his food, and his great ambition his motive power…His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

In keeping with this drive, Lincoln immersed himself at an early age in the Whig Party, the equivalent of today’s country club crowd, and made himself quite comfortable among its wealthiest members. It was not without expressed distaste that Lincoln frequented the finest parlors, but the object of securing office came before fighting for abolition. On that hard issue alone, Lincoln left something wanting when it comes to greatness. Consider two of Lincoln’s early quotes regarding Negroes, cited in Hofstadter’s book.

“I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, but I bite my lips and keep quiet.”  And  “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals. My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”

Yikes!

The Emancipation Proclamation itself had “all the grandeur of a bill of lading” as Hofstadter noted. William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State is quoted as saying in response to it, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating the slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

The instincts of compassion were there in Lincoln, to be sure, but it took him until 1854 to write these words. “As a nation we began by declaring, ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics’. When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

And thus Lincoln tiptoed through one of the greatest social and political minefields of all time; from a standpoint of political expedience, and with carefully suppressed passions. I think it is fair to say, the man we credit with freeing the slaves would be considered the ultimate flip-flopper in today’s parlance.

Yet for all that Lincoln spoke out of both sides of his mouth, hoping to get elected, and to maintain his office, and his endless prevarications publicly on the subject of slavery, does anyone doubt Lincoln’s lofty place in American history? I don’t. Here was a man, as Hofstadter put it, who bore the sins of an entire nation, gave his life for it, and did so with “malice towards none and charity for all.” As John Hay, another contemporary who knew Lincoln well, said of him, “he was the greatest character since Christ.”

It was against the backdrop that I was reading Bob Herbert’s lament on Barack Obama the other day.

My God, he’s tacking to the center. He’s abandoned his principles. He’s lost his compass.

That seemed to be the essence of Herbert’s abject lament, and one can only imagine how he would have fared had he been alive then and writing about Lincoln’s political masquerades instead.

For me, personally, during this current Presidential campaign, I’ve journeyed from being a staunch supporter of John Edwards to a wary admirer of Obama. And I will admit to casting a somewhat more skeptical eye towards Obama in recent weeks. It is not an easy political minefield he walks, but thus goes the dirty little business of getting elected. Lincoln understood it. Perhaps the straight shooting John Edwards did not. After all, the fact that Edwards was forced out of the nomination process early is damning of American politics, not of the man.

Sad as it is for this old hippie to accept, there’s an inescapable fan dance to attaining power, so don’t be surprised to see me holding my nose now and then during this election process, but I still put my faith in this simple belief. Like Lincoln, Obama will do the right thing when history affords him the chance. I don’t expect to like every decision he makes, but let’s not confuse the sordid game of politics with a man’s essential character, or with the stature he’ll bring to the Oval Office. To do so would be to say an imperfect man like Lincoln was never capable of greatness .

As with Lincoln, hopefully we are buying something deeper with Barack Obama, some inner metal that goes beyond what a focus group will dictate for today; a man who may not speak for all Americans, all of the time, but who will speak for most of us, most of the time. Above all, in Obama, one can sense the potential for greatness, and even more so, the potential to draw out the greatness in us. At the least, the very act of electing Barack Obama President will tell the world volumes about this nation’s character, more than a hundred years of apologies could ever say.

Again, I am only speaking for myself, but I fully expect on the day Obama steps up to the nation’s Capitol and gives his Inaugural Address, the tone and timber of this entire nation will change, along with the tone of this entire planet. It is the power we ascribe to Lincoln and other great characters of history, and I dare say, a thought that will never enter the mind when considering John McCain.