A month ago, none of the men campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination met the approval of commentator Peggy Noonan. There were two qualifications, one a regard for the executive position as an exalted one for uncommon men, the other a determination to somehow transcend normalcy and become so paramountly qualified; apparent in both, the fastidiousness that sometimes accumulates in the writing of the author in question.
"Candidates on the trail today," Noonan reproved in the Wall Street Journal, "would be better off keeping as their template for the office Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — the unattainable greats." Noonan was part of a collaborative publication on presidential leadership from three years ago, one in which the founding triumvirate was included. Surely she must have considered the raw material from which these men's heroic legacies were made?
Before Abraham Lincoln was final arbiter of a great American dispute, there was Abraham Lincoln the kindly knockabout and then Abraham Lincoln the obstreperous partisan. A newly elected Whig representative in Washington, January 1848, Lincoln decried American entry and supremacy in the Mexican War. He literally anathematized President James Knox Polk by suggesting that "he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him." The independence of Texas was, to Lincoln, obverse to the freedom of Mexican subjects. What he thought of the militarist Santa Anna we don't know, as Lincoln must have run out of invective.
That was as a Whig, and that was politics. Thirteen years later Lincoln would be in controversy himself, spoken of vividly but perhaps not always in the reverence Noonan might infer from his settled biography.
There is a war on now, and the president conducting it bears in defamation all the names Lincoln called President Polk. It isn't Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, the tacitly running Fred Thompson or even the contrarian Ron Paul who is insulting George Bush or devaluing the office or making a cad of himself. A common esteem is held among them but not by one for himself. Can you or I humbly institute greatness? The candidate who tries that would probably not be the fulfillment for somebody who reads like she is hoping to vote for a living saint.