The Lincoln Exception

The inconvenient truth for anyone looking to make the "experience matters" argument is that the least-experienced president was not, as I said yesterday Jimmy Carter, but instead the well-regarded Abraham Lincoln. Of course, though nobody can ever decide what "exception that proves the rule" means, the 1860 election is the exception that proves the rule. We saw a robust multi-party election, in which the two candidates running toward the center (Bell and Douglas) got crushed in the electoral college by candidates playing to the extremes. It's always interesting to note that, had the Civil War not ended in a Union victory and with the semi-deification of Lincoln, it's almost certain that more people would have noticed that the electoral system that put Lincoln in the White House was absurd.

His platform was decisively rejected by sixty percent of the voters all of whom, despite their differences, opposed the Republican anti-slavery line. What's more, the political ascendancy of a party pushing an unpopular extremist agenda led directly to horrifically bloody civil strife. Now, as it happens, slavery was an appalling moral evil so nobody's very upset in retrospect that the median (white male) voter didn't get the Douglas Administration it clearly wanted. Nevertheless, it's still not a desirable feature of the voting system in general.