Brian Howey: Lincoln, Obama and the whirlwind upon us

By Brian Howey

INDIANAPOLIS  – Watching U.S. Sen. Barack Obama give one of the most stirring and enriching speeches of my journalistic career fresh off his stunning 8 percent victory in the Iowa caucuses, I couldn't help but think of the parallels to the last president from Illinois.

Without Abraham Lincoln, there would be no Barack Obama. At the beginning of both of their campaigns for the presidency - 148 years apart - neither possessed the top resume in their parties. Line up Lincoln's career against Seward, Chase and Bates in 1860 and you most likely wouldn't have chosen the rail splitter.

He became a great president. His Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural speech resounded in biblical tones and essentially completed the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

Obama's resume is similarly challenged as he faces a former First Lady, a former vice presidential nominee and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Here is a two-year U.S. senator, and an eight-year state senator, seeking the most important office on earth. But when you listened to Obama in Iowa, you heard the soaring voice of a community organizer just across the Indiana state line on the south side of Chicago. You heard a man who could have joined a white shoe law firm after leaving Harvard, but chose a pauper's existence, toiling for the poor and who became a Sox fan.

We heard Obama say, "We are choosing hope over fear, unity over division. This is a defining moment in history. We are one nation, one people and our time for change has come. People who love this country can change it."

Obama's victory came in Iowa, a state that is 96 percent white and had never elected a significant African-American politician. He talked of his father from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. Slaves from the African continent had pulled Abraham Lincoln into the issue of abolition, and he toured bloody Kansas a few years before his presidential candidacy trying to establish a new American moral code.

In late summer, the New York Times declared Sen. Hillary Clinton's inevitability. But then we began to hear Obama's deep voice. He went from an unemotional academic to a political figure that began delivering the resonance and passion needed for a nation that has spent the last seven years fighting the War on Terror and negotiating color-coded terror threats.

A culture of fear is firmly gripping America.  We've seen it as we've turned away foreign college students, foreign tourists and denigrated overseas investors. Our government has flipped 180 degrees since the mid-point between Lincoln and Obama when we had a president who said, "The only thing we have to fear is ... fear itself."

Last February, I journeyed to Springfield, Ill., to listen as Obama ignited his campaign. The day before Obama would give his introductory speech, I toured the Lincoln home. The day after, I visited his tomb. In between, I would hear Obama intone, "It was here, in Springfield, where North, South, East and West come together, that I was reminded of the essential decency of the American people, where I came to believe that through this decency we can build a more hopeful America. And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States."

"I recognize," Obama continued, "there is a certain presumptuousness - a certain audacity - to this announcement. I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington."

Many in the crowd yelled, "Good," and many cheered. Obama was casting himself as the 2008 outsider and change agent.

In Iowa, voters took the anti-Washington, pro-change route, just as they had in 1860. There stood Obama and former GOP Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as victorious change agents in the Great Midwest.

In 1860, at the Republican convention in Chicago, it was the Hoosier delegation led by Henry S. Lane that first tipped the balance toward Lincoln's nomination, and then, sandwiching the tentative Pennsylvania delegation between the Hoosiers and Suckers, set the stage for his dramatic four-ballot nomination.

This year, the Iowans may have set the stage for history.

Five days later, in New Hampshire, the stunning victory of Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Sen. John McCain for the Republicans revealed how delicate a movement such as Obama's can be. Forty years ago, U.S. Sen. Ed Muskie wept on a flatbed truck in front of the Manchester Union-Leader and it destroyed his campaign. When Clinton teared up in a Portsmouth café, it tugged at the hearts and minds of female voters (who out-voted the men 57-43 percent) and sent this race into completely uncharted waters.

This all comes as we've watched the cross currents of change and fear tug at the heart of our own state. Now there is a stir in the air, a gale from the West, and a message of hope. A whirlwind is upon us.

  Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com

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