Ford-Lincoln-Mercutio

ROMEO: I dream'd a dream to-night.
MERCUTIO: And so did I.
ROMEO: Well, what was yours?
MERCUTIO: That dreamers often lie.

It is truly bizarre how despite the fact that most Republicans in Congress and around the country have turned their backs on Bush, some just can't be cured of their Bush fetishes. They seem to see him as some sort of visionary, a dreamer who is misunderstood by the world. Dispiritingly delusional, this group includes Rudy Guiliani, the would-be Republican presidential nominee.

Holding up as examples the top two presidents in the Republican pantheon, Lincoln and Reagan, Giuliani explained their leadership qualities.

“I don’t imagine that they had those favorable/unfavorable things back during the Civil War,” but Lincoln would not have fared well, Giuliani said.

Seeming to draw present-day comparisons, Giuliani noted that Lincoln even faced riots in New York City because people were unhappy with the war. “They wanted to quit because it was getting too tough.”

There were extensive casualties, the conflict dragged on and Lincoln had to fire many of his generals, Giuliani reminded the salad-eating crowd.

For right-wing crackpots, the comparisons go (or at least ought to go) beyond simply presiding over tons of casualties and firing generals. Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, as has Bush. Both Bush and Lincoln thought they were engaged in existential struggles over the very fiber of our nation. Comparing Bush to Lincoln also provides the convenience of the fact that today just about everybody thinks the Civil War was worth fighting, whereas just about no one thinks that about Iraq. This comparison does not hold up very well overall, of course.

For one thing, as opposed to Iraq, the Civil War actually was an existential struggle. If the Union had lost, the country would have been literally ripped in two. The struggle today is nothing like so serious, since Bush says the only way we can lose is to withdraw from Iraq. (Sounds fine to me.) And I don't think the reason Lincoln is popular today is the huge death toll he racked up. To tell the truth, I think it's disgusting how many people died during the Civil War all for the sake of making sure I still get to be in a country that includes Alabama. But Lincoln's rationale was more that the states cannot opt in or out of the Union at any time, forcing us to stick together whether we like it or not. In the long run, I believe this has been a healthy precedent to protect.

Another difference between Bush and Lincoln is that Lincoln didn't really have to worry that much about economic ennui. The country secession of half the country was a substantial economic disruption that had a clear military solution, and the nature of the sacrifice must have been clear to the citizen of the day. Bush, on the other hand, expressly requires no sacrifices of Americans during our present existential struggle, preferring that they just keep buying stuff. So today no one really cares what Lincoln's economic policies were, but I think a lot of people are going to keep caring about Bush's.

And the number one thing I think of when Bush and the economy come up together is his support for the plutocratic corporate order. In an excellent article, William Pfaff provides the key to explaining both Bush's foreign policy blunders and his economic blunders. An overinflated sense of American exceptionalism is probably to blame both for quixotic quagmires overseas and
the unacceptable injustice all around us. As Pfaff says,

American efforts to deregulate the international economy and promote globalization, whatever its benefits, have been the most powerful force of political, economic, social, and cultural destabilization the world has known since World War II, providing what closely resembles that "constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" forecast by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.

For an example of the destabilizing injustice of the corporatist plutocracy, let's look at Ford Motors. Not because Ford is unique, but because it is recent and oh so typical. As Devilstower points out over at Dailykos, Ford posted its worst loss ever last quarter. This was because of short-sighted planning and market positioning by top brass, not because guys on the assembly line weren't working hard enough. The solution? Fire 40,000 and give bigger bonuses to the top brass!

This is the kind of system we get under Bush, and, for that matter, under Clinton. As Devilstower notes, though, Democrats like Jim Webb are not on board with this system; to Webb I would add other freshman Democrats like Sherrod Brown and old salts like Barney Frank. With sensible leaders like these, hopefully we can start to fix some of the worst injustices to the middle class at least and ideally to the poor as well.

Just for the sake of fairness and balance, let me tell you about a couple of Democrats who don't appear to have received the memo on making life more fair: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton we always knew about, since she has the backing of all the elites and is so deeply allied with the DLC.

Since election to his Senate term, Obama has basically coopted the DLC playbook of valuing bipartisanship above all else. This is as self-serving and defeatist as it's ever been, but Paul Krugman is also right to point out that Obama's rhetoric about rhetoric is missing the point. A lot of people attack Obama for having a thin Senate record and wring their hands about his lack of experience, but his substance problem doesn't have that much to do with his record. Having been a civil rights attorney and spent some eight odd years in elected office, he has more substantive experience than Bush had when he became president. No, the substance argument against Obama is boils down to the fact that he thinks it's more important to establish a polite tone than to fix problems.

While Bush may be a dreamer, he is certainly no Lincoln. Neither is Clinton or Obama (who plans to officially announce his campaign around Lincoln's birthday in scenic Springfield, IL, hometown of Honest Abe himself). The next most admired leader we have will match Lincoln's courage in pursuing a dubious war with today's economic problems. In other words, we don't need a Lincoln to solve our war, we need FDR to save ourselves.