The arrogance of Barack Obama

Sgwhite points us to this story over at Politico which was just made for bloggers:

In Barack Obama's appearance last month on CBS's "60 Minutes," the conversation turned to the president-elect's long-time love of Lincoln.

"There is a wisdom there," Obama told interviewer Steve Kroft, "and a humility about his approach to government, even before he was president, that I just find very helpful."

Humility? Obama's frequent invocations of Abraham Lincoln -- a man enshrined in myth and marble with his own temple on the National Mall -- would not at first blush say much about his own instincts for modesty or self-effacement.

And now there are early rumblings of a backlash to Obama's ostentatious embrace of all things Lincoln, with his not-so-subtle invitations to compare the 44th president to the 16th, the "Savior of the Union."

Simply put, some scholars think the comparisons have gone a bit over the top hat.

Let us leave aside the fact that it takes some serious semantic games to turn a comment on Obama's admiration of Lincoln into him making the comparison. Let us leave aside, Politico's "backlash" consists of two historians--one of them being Sean Wilentz. Let us also mercifully ignore that the Politco, in a shocking bit of unwitting humor and irony, headlined their own story"Strawman."

No, let us focus on the authors. The name of one them--Alexander Burns--rings a bell. I wonder why? Oh yeah, Bell has written about Obama and Lincoln before. Or more to the point, he interview Doris Kearns Goodwin about the comparisons. Surely he would not have insinuated any comparison between Obama and Lincoln in that interview, would he? Certainly he had taken that opportunity to furrow his brow at the such facile, flavor of the moment comparisons, hadn't he? Hadn't he??