At his first inauguration ceremony, on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama set the tone with a line from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “A New Birth of Freedom”. Confident of his place amongst the giants of American history, the forty-fourth president has never been reluctant to compare his destiny with that of The Great Emancipator, the sixteenth president. The fact remains, however, that the Party of Lincoln was the Republican Party, specifically created in the 1850s to defeat slavery. In sharp contrast, the Democratic Party—forever the representative of sectional interests—was mostly in favour of slavery at the time of the Civil War.
This article can be read in full at the following link:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2013/1-2/barack-obama-v-the-party-of-lincoln
