Benjamin Franklin was a man, who, in his time would have severely disappointed most of his countrymen had they known more about him. He was a first rate intellect, a gifted politician, a man who questioned and experimented, who discovered the electrical nature of lightning, an inventor of practical things like spectacles. But he was also an unfaithful husband, who enjoyed his mistresses while serving as a diplomatic envoy to France, and his womanizing would have scandalized 18th century America. D.H. Lawrence, looking over Franklin's public endorsement of prevailing American Puritanism, while practicing the libertine life in Paris, thought Franklin a moral reprobate for his hypocrisy, not for his behavior, but for his duplicity.
Lincoln, the greatest of our Presidents by several leagues, was a man of his times and of his place. He signed the order hanging Indians in the Midwest. He shared the view that Negroes were likely not the intellectual equal of whites, and he suggested that the most intelligent Negroes might, eventually, be allowed to vote. When the Great Emancipator issued the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "If I could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the union by freeing none of the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the union by freeing some and leaving others in bondage, I would do that." In the end, he took the third choice: He freed slaves only in states currently in rebellion against the federal government. So slaves in Maryland and other border states which remained "loyal" were not freed. But he also said, when looking back over his tenure, summarizing during his second inaugural address, the war had been caused in some way by the existence of slaves in the South. Everyone wanted to deny it, he said, everyone wanted to think otherwise, to think some solution short of complete abolition was possible, but it was not possible, and so the war came. Thinking back on all the carnage, Lincoln, not a man inclined to embrace organized religion, still thought in mystical terms postulating the war may have been God's price, God's requirement that to pay for the 300 years of bondage, a drop of blood had to be shed on the battlefield for each drop of blood drawn by the bondsman's whip. A man with little or no formal education, no Harvard degree, became the 19th century's greatest American writer, its greatest political scientist and one of its greatest philosophers.
Then there was Grant, a failure for much of his life, the classic example of the hedgehog as in "the fox is clever and knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one thing and does it very well." For Grant tenacity, persistence and humility trumped whatever demons brought him to drink, and occasional unpreparedness. He knew one thing: The war could be won only by destroying Lee's army. Unlike any other union general, he latched on to Lee like a bulldog, teeth sunk into the lip of a bull, and he would not let go. His tactic was the assault, the flanking maneuver, but always keeping South of Lee, allowing him, in the end, no escape. And when he wrote his magnificent memoirs, Grant showed his career was no accident but an outgrowth of a character of monumental proportions.
When Barack Obama is criticized in the pages of our greatest newspapers and magazines and on line, I can only think, "who are these midgets, attacking this giant?" It's the attack of the Lilliputians. The man is not clairvoyant; he can be maddeningly reluctant to engage his opponents; he can fail to see the true nature of the forces arrayed against him, but he is so far beyond the Mitch McConnells, the John Boehners, the Samuel Alitos, the Antonin Scalias, the Maureen Dowds, the David Brooks, the George F. Wills, the Charles Krauthammers, the Rush Limbaughs and the Mitt Romneys and Paul Ryans, the comparison is almost not worth considering.
Win or lose day after tomorrow, it will not be Mr. Obama's failure, it will be a revelation of what sort of nation we actually are.
