Without question, what Lincoln called "public sentiment" is and always has been a key battleground; and insofar as agitators such as the abolitionists affect that sentiment, they have a crucial role to play in democratic politics (as Lincoln also recognized). But it is one thing to acknowledge the effects of outsiders and radicals and quite another to vaunt their supposed purity in order to denigrate mainstream politics and politicians. The implication of this anti-political or meta-political narrative is that the outsiders are the truly admirable figures, whereas presidents are merely the outsiders' lesser, reluctant instruments. Anyone who points out the obvious fact that, without a politically supple, energetic, and devoted president, change will never come, runs the risk of being branded an elitist or worse. (Hillary Clinton discovered as much during last year's presidential primaries, when she spoke admiringly about how Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) Lincoln may be the only one of these presidents who, having seen the light, went on to earn a kind of secular sainthood; but his redemption from grubby politics and self-interested prudence had to precede his martyrdom and canonization. That redemption came as a result of the dramatic resistance of the lowly slaves, and of the words and the actions of uncompromising abolitionists...

Like the Mugwumps, many present-day American historians assume that political calculation, opportunism, careerism, and duplicity negate idealism and political integrity. Like the Mugwumps, they charge that the similarities between the corrupt major political parties overwhelm their differences. Like the Mugwumps, they equate purposefulness with political purity. Consequently, their writings slight how all great American leaders, including many of the outsiders they idealize, have relied on calculation, opportunism, and all the other democratic political arts in order to advance their loftiest and most controversial goals. And they slight how the achievement of America's greatest advances, including the abolition of slavery, would have been impossible without the strenuous efforts of the calculators and the opportunists in the leadership of American politics.

At its most straightforward, caustic, and predictable--as in the balefully influential works of Howard Zinn, who has described Lincoln as at best "a kind man" who had to be "pushed by the antislavery movement" into emancipation--this post-1960s populist history writing is just as skewed as the tendentious "great white male" historiography that it has supposedly discredited. Other populist historians are more generous, allowing Lincoln--and, occasionally, Franklin Roosevelt--to escape relatively unscathed, and even ennobled. But if it is history that we really care about, then we must recognize that the populist storyline of Lincoln's redemption and transfiguration, like the other versions, makes a hash of his actual life and times.

By the way, it's not clear to me that Lincoln's speech on Pierce is inconsistent in any way with his subsequent position on slavery.  It seems entirely plausible, particularly given the deep understanding of partisanship Lincoln was to display later in his Cooper Union speech, that Lincoln would happily mock a member of the pro-slavery Democratic Party who was trying to have it both ways by expressing distaste for the Fugitive Slave Law.

Gates opines:

If Phillis Wheatley was the Mother of African American literature, there's a sense in which Thomas Jefferson can be thought of as its midwife. Indeed, we could analyze, had we the time this evening, scores of commentators who sought to refute Jefferson's arguments in Query XIV, from the 1780s through the twentieth century. Moreover, Jefferson's comments about the role of their literature in any meaningful assessment of the African American's civil rights, became the strongest motivation for blacks to create a body of literature that would implicitly prove Jefferson wrong. This is Wheatley's, and Jefferson's, curious legacy in American literature.

McCain thought Palin was fit for VP but Sotomayor is not fit for SCOTUS

The White House shot down concerns Monday that middle-class families may face a tax increase in order to combat rising deficits and a struggling economy.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says the stimulus plan is working, but tough choices may be ahead.

"The president was clear during the campaign about his commitment on not raising taxes on middle-class families," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday afternoon. "I don't think any economist would believe that, in the environment that we're in, that raising taxes on middle-class families would make any sense."

The concern came after the Obama administration's two top money men floated the idea that tax increases to fund the nation's economic recovery could extend beyond the wealthiest Americans.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council, said Sunday they could no longer guarantee the middle class will be spared a tax increase.

"We have to do what's necessary," Geithner said on ABC's "This Week." "The critical thing is people understand that when we have recovery established -- led by the private sector -- and we have to bring these deficits down very dramatically ... we have to bring them down to a level where the amount we're borrowing from the world is stable and at a reasonable level."

Geithner added that "very hard choices" need to be made in order to bring down the deficit.

"And we're going to have to try and do that in a way that doesn't add unfairly to the burdens that the average American homeowner already faces."  
Summers said on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday that "there's a lot that can happen over time ... so it's never a good idea to absolutely ... rule things out no matter what."

When pressed by reporters Monday on Geithner and Summers' comments, Gibbs said "They allowed themselves to get into a little hypothetical back-and-forth."

"We do have big structural deficits that are going to have to be dealt with in order to meet the president's commitment of cutting this deficit," Gibbs said. "I think what they both talked about was ... we're not going to be able to sustain any kind of economic recovery until we do have a path towards fiscal responsibility. They also said that shouldn't be done as a way of burdening middle-class families."

Also, things must be looked at in the context of its times...

----"and he is a legislator and a liar,
----but then I repeat myself."