Abraham Lincoln - Whig Politician, Republican President

Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. We always honor Mr. Lincoln as the leader destined by his unique gifts of eloquence and political courage to save the Union - The United States of America - from collapse under the extreme, partisan debate over slavery. America's attachment to Lincoln, the savior sent by God, makes it difficult to accept the fact that he was a hard-fighting, accomplished party organizer and politician. But, this was also Lincoln and it lent much to his extraordinary presidency. In 1986, the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association published a monograph by Joel Silbey, "Always a Whig in Politics," in which Silbey tries to reconcile the hero we know as President Lincoln with the man who practiced Illinois and national Whig practical party politics for almost 30 years before lending his Whig weight to the founding of the Republican Party. The Whigs were a Henry Clay party, composed of a variety of leaders and followers. Silbey writes about three groups of Whigs in the 1840s : (1) the pre-party, conservative statesmen group, rooted in an earlier political culture, unwilling to change gears in a new age of partisan party politics, suspicious of mass politics and its simplifying of difficult issues. (2) the second group was also hostile to the demands of party organization and discipline. They were moral crusading, reformist, purifying Whigs, men such as the anti-slavery spokesman, John Quincy Adams. Resolutely committed to a single priority, passionately wanting their desired policies enacted and refusing to defer to political realities or the need to compromise, they were constantly frustrated by the demands of party discipline and the need to maintain more broadly based coalitions than would support very specific, contentious, reform proposals. And (3) there was, finally and critically, a third type of Whig, including Lincoln, and William H. Seward, who were realists-pragmatists, shrewd political operators, at home with the new system, or at least willing to play by its rules in the absence of any other possibilities. The pluralism of American life and the requirement to mobilize broadly based electoral coalitions, all led Lincoln and many others to develop both the skills of political party organizers and leaders, as well as being public political figures in the greater national debate over the role of business, land policy, and slavery. Why, dear readers, do I talk of a political party that died in 1856 in the birthing pains of the Republican Party? Because it was Lincoln's leaving the Whigs in 1856 to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party he helped found (he finally was nominated in 1860) that killed the Whig Party. Lincoln continued all his life to say that he felt he was a Whig, but that the Republican Party was needed. And today, 150 years after Abraham Lincoln created the Republican Party, his creation is in the throes of a fundamental identity crisis, much like the Whigs of the 1850s who could not survive in the changed world in which they found themselves -- a world no longer managed by the Founders' intellectual dialogue in the face of fundamental political questions. Today's GOP finds itself in a multi-cultural political world which has broken the mold in which the Republican Party flourished. The GOP is not dead...but it must adapt or perish. Instead of adapting earlier, starting in the aftermath of 1964, the moderate GOP wing has been forced to take "social issue litmus tests" to be considered as Republican candidates. The most galling was to force George Bush pere to support right to life with no abortion when everyone knew he didn't believe what he said. Take. No give. Reagan finessed because he was at heart a very conservative person who kept social issues out of GOP politics. Hats off to him. Post Reagan, the issues were economic and the entire GOP rallied to bring Clinton to the center on budget matters. But since the 2000 election, the reality is that no moderate has been listened to...either as potential candidates or as elected officials. The fear that paralyzes the GOP in Washington has nothing to do with the ripe-for-picking Democrats dissatisfied with Obama. It has to do with the fear that if they, as GOP politicians, don't toe the litmus test line on social issues, they will be opposed by candidates who do. I repeat what I have said before - that approach works at the more local levels because the local majority gets the candidate it prefers. But, if a moderate district elects a moderate candidate to Congress, his voice is immediately silenced by fear of defeat at the hands of a tea party supported candidate who does not reflect the GOP majority in his district, and who in 2012 occasionally lost the general election. Why? Because the tea party is forcing a very conservative platform on districts that are moderate. So...surprise! The Democrat wins. If this is not political suicide, I have never seen it. Where is the political leadership and discipline that makes compromise a reality when dealing with the tea party? It doesn't exist. I am in favor of GOP victories...not because of social issues...but because the GOP still is the party of fiscal responsibility, individual liberties and constitutional government. But the tea party is pushing the GOP to an artificial right. And, when the reckoning comes, the GOP will be re-centered by the pragmatists, as Lincoln re-centered the Whigs by making Republicans out of them...because that is where the GOP belongs and where the history of this great country has been written. If you don't believe me, ask Abraham Lincoln.