There is a bit of a brohauhau over Barak Obama’s use of Abraham Lincoln’ bible in his inauguration ceremony.  Or, supposedly there is.  Actually mostly what I see is that Obama’s use of Lincoln’s bible is a jumping off point to trump up Lincoln as a “War President” and Obama as a Copperhead — bleh them and bleh him.  Well, it will be interesting and portentious to say the least to see how Obama winds through policies to Afghanistan (and the Pakistan border region) and Iraq, I suppose.  (To appease the Weekly Standard writer, I am sort of pleased to see that in my search, I did find one of those “Bush Hitler” postings that you can find if you look.  Don’t worry… the Obama Hitler postings are surfacing about — I encourage you to tie them down with that image, even though there’s complications with that one.  Maybe it’s a good time to switch models for overwrought dictator comparisons … it’s all about Mussolini!)

Presidents tend to evoke presidents who history has judged well.  The Mount Rushmore Mafia and a handful of figures surrounding them.  For instance, Reagan’s Coolidge fetish was largely in private or amongst sympaticos — he didn’t much quote Coolidge in his public speeches.  Or maybe he did… all eight of the Reagan years were all eight (minus a few months) of my most formative of years … I wasn’t paying attention at the time.  But here in the honeymoon period, Obama is paralleled to Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, detractors reach for Carter, as detractors of Bush now reach for Hoover.

So the incoming Obama Administration’s high faluting press release notwithstanding, Obama could very easily have just gone with … Jefferson’s Bible (or Keith Ellison’s Quran).  But the “Team of Rivals” theory which is being injected into Obama’s admistration — an item which, truth be told, worked badly for President Lincoln would not be meshed in with the “triumph over slavery” history.

Obama should have surprised and stumped everyone and released a high faluting press release announcing that he is going to be swearing in with the same bible used by President Chester Arthur.  The idea here is that he is, I don’t know, that even as a man who came out of Illinois politics, he is making a clean break from the corruption of the Blagoeviches of the world, just as even though Arthur was a Stawlart, he reformed Civil Service?  That and they both have funny names, so there’s that legacy to continue.  As good a message to send as any, I say, albeit probably a tad too obscure.

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