With Sunday marking the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the time seems ripe to re-examine how Barack Obama tried to copy that presidents playbook in staffing his administration.
Back in 2005, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a liberal pundit who wrote a hagiography of her old boss Lyndon Johnson and who has faced major accusations of plagiarism, released Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The book recounts how Lincoln took some of his leading opponents for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 and placed them in his Cabinet.
William Henry Seward, a former governor and U.S. senator from New York, had been the front-runner going into the Republican convention that year and, while he first had some doubts about Lincoln, he ended up as a very solid secretary of state and became one of Lincolns chief political advisers.
Salmon Chase from Ohio, another Republican hopeful, ended up running the Treasury, but his relationship with Lincoln was much more turbulent.
Yet another defeated Republican presidential candidate -- Edward Bates, an old Whig from Missouri -- ended up as Lincolns attorney general, though he was nowhere near as important as Seward or Chase.
Simon Cameron, a leading Republican boss from Pennsylvania who also ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, ended up as secretary of war for a year. With charges of corruption and incompetence leveled against Cameron, Lincoln banished the Pennsylvanian to serve as ambassador to Russia and brought in the much more efficient Edwin Stanton to head up the War Department.
The book did fairly well with the public -- probably because Goodwin, unlike the tenured bureaucrats who infest history departments at universities all across this country, actually writes books meant to be read instead of tomes that merely add a line or two to her curriculum vitae. While almost all of the politicians in Lincoln's Cabinet underestimated their boss, he was able to lead them effectively -- even in the midst of the greatest crisis this nation has ever seen.
When Obama won the presidency in 2008, he looked to follow Lincolns blueprint in constructing his administration. Hillary Clinton, Obamas chief rival for the Democratic nomination, ended up as secretary of state. Joe Biden, who bowed out of the race early after finishing fifth place in Iowa, ended up as vice president. Bill Richardson, who placed fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire, was supposed to run the Commerce Department but he withdrew after facing pay-to-play accusations, though the grand jury looking into the matter did not pursue it. Its conceivable that John Edwards could have ended up in the Obama administration, perhaps as attorney general, had the sordid details of his private life not emerged in the summer of 2008.
But while Lincoln was able to successfully lead his team of rivals, the result has been far different for Obama. Unemployment and gas prices continued to go up under Obama, while his signature piece of legislation, the federal health-care bill, remains very unpopular. He faces a challenge in November to win a second term.
While Obama may have tried to follow the model established by Lincoln, his presidency seems a bit more like another 19th century president who had a team of rivals -- Franklin Pierce. Pierce, the affable scion of a political dynasty from New Hampshire, had an extremely undistinguished decade in both chambers of Congress before, after a decade in the political wilderness, he ended up as a compromise choice as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1852.
Pierce brought his rivals for the Democratic nomination into his administration. Like Clinton, a veteran of the slippery ladder of New York politics, William L. Marcy, who had come close to winning the nomination in 1852, ended up at the State Department.
Another candidate who came close to winning the nomination -- James Buchanan -- ended up with the plum position of ambassador to England and had James Campbell, one of his chief supporters, installed as postmaster general dispensing the federal patronage. While Lewis Cass, who came up short as the Democratic presidential nominee in 1848 and had also run for the Democratic nod in 1852, refused to serve in the Pierce administration, one of his leading lieutenants in Michigan -- Robert McClelland -- ended up heading the Interior Department.
Southerners, increasingly defending slavery in the decade before the Civil War, were represented by William R. King, another Buchanan supporter, as vice president and Pierces old friend Jefferson Davis as secretary of war.
The result was a disaster. Pierce, a family man like Obama appears to be, lost the last of his three children in a horrific train accident in the weeks before he was inaugurated -- leading his wife to take solace in religion while he took comfort in the bottle. With no executive experience, Pierce struggled with his new responsibilities.
Just like Obama supported a controversial piece of legislation in his second year in office -- the federal health-care bill -- Pierces most prominent legislative accomplishment blew up in his face. Pierces support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act tore offthe bandages of the Compromise of 1850 and the nation continued to bleed over slavery and sectionalism. Democrats -- burdened by Obama in 2010 and Pierce in 1854 -- were routed across the country in the midterm election.
With party strategists thinking the president was toxic with independent voters and former Whigs who would not back the fledgling Republican and Know Nothing parties, Pierce was defeated for the Democratic nomination in 1856 by Buchanan -- the first time an incumbent elected president went down to defeat for renomination. While Obama is in better shape with his party than Pierce was, he still faces the challenge of keeping independents that he won in 2008 in his column in November.
With Steven Spielberg directing a movie based on "Team of Rivals," with Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, coming out later this year, expect renewed talk about Obama following Honest Abes game plan. But with the specter of being a one-term president looming in November, Obama could be joining Pierce as a failure, even with a team of rivals behind him.
Reach Kevin Derby at kderby@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859. As a senior studying history at Trinity College, Kevin stumbled across Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills by Roy Nichols, which ranks as one of the true jewels of American political biography.
