Arianna Huffington v. Frederick Douglass (re Emancipation Proclamation & Lincoln's compromises)

[pampango]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2011/07/18/arianna_huffington_vs_frederick_douglass/

The big headline from the president's little talk is that he bashed the Huffington Post – twice! First, he told the college Republicans in attendance that he knows they consider him a liberal president, while "if you read the Huffington Post, you'd think I was some right-wing tool of Wall Street. Both things can't be true." But I was much more interested in Obama's later comments about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, because he captures a complexity that's often missed by people on the left – but he misses some complexity, too.

Obama explained that even though Lincoln opposed slavery, his Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states that were fighting against the Union; it didn't apply to slave states that were Union allies. Obama's not pointing that out to call Lincoln a hypocrite or malign his commitment to eradicating slavery; he's describing it as a savvy pragmatism, a leader understanding the limits of his time. "Here you've got a wartime president who's making a compromise around probably the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced because he understood that `right now my job is to win the war and to maintain the union,'" Obama told the students.

So news and opinion journals of Lincoln's day that shared Lincoln's larger goal of emancipation for all slaves did indeed criticize the president's sometimes halting moves on slavery. I also have a problem with the notion that the Huffington Post represents liberals, progressives, or their interest groups. The Huffington Post is a business, and Arianna Huffington, who's been an entrepreneur of ideas, and of herself, since Obama was a college student, shouldn't be used as a stand-in for the left. It makes a kind of perverse sense, though, that the president would see it that way, since the Huffington Post was a house organ of the Obama-supporting left during 2008. Its reasons were part principle and part positioning, as Obama's Web-centric campaign created an instant audience for a pro-Obama lefty news source. Oh well. Arianna giveth, and Arianna taketh away. I'm really not sure why the president reads much into any of that.

In his memoir, Douglass wrote about anxiously awaiting the proclamation in Boston, with a group of abolitionists. Some feared Lincoln might not even go through with it, he admitted, describing the 16th president in words that today he might use to describe our own: "Mr. Lincoln was known to be a man of tender heart, and boundless patience; no man could tell to what length he might go, or might refrain from going in the direction of peace and reconciliation." Douglass and his Boston group rejoiced when word of the proclamation came through. As he wrote at the time, "We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree."

Then came some disappointment. "Further and more critical examination showed it to be extremely defective," Douglass recalled in his memoir. "It was not a proclamation of "liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof," such as we had hoped it would be; but was one marked by discrimination and reservations." Douglass and other black abolitionists also criticized Lincoln's decision to pay black soldiers who enlisted to fight for the Union a lesser wage than white soldiers. They wanted Lincoln, who they admired, to do more, and do it faster.

[meow mix]

1. he governs as a weakling and defeatist. and he has 80 percent of americans on his side.

did lincoln have that? i do not know.

quite a grand attempt at justifying his do-nothing-ness though (clap clap)