Syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm: Biden and Carter call up Lincoln

By Jamie Stiehm

Good on you, Joe Biden. You warmed the American presidency as we've known it lately, by visiting Ukraine in the winter of war.

The 40-hour secret journey to see President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took a lionheart and told all peoples that America stands on the side of freedom.

Fare-thee-well, Jimmy Carter, 98, a wise kind sage.

We hardly knew ye in the White House, wracked by oil prices, inflation and the agonizing Iran hostage crisis, which you resolved just in time as your opponent Ronald Reagan took office.

But you won the Nobel Peace Prize as a champion for human rights, and nobody can take that away from you.

A second term may have been less bumpy. Yet you and your wife Rosalynn demonstrated tremendous heart and soul building houses for the poor in your post-presidency.

These two presidents, Biden and Carter, are the best of us. They bring me back to the Civil War president.

Biden and Carter, mixed and stirred, are a tonic for the tragedy of the 21st century. After the lawless Donald Trump, coolly cerebral Barack Obama and bellicose George W. Bush, we've suffered enough.

(To one liberal, Obama talked a better game than he played. He failed at succession, for one thing, erasing much of his legacy.)

At this moment in time, America is wary and wounded from the pandemic and the Jan. 6 mutiny. Yet extremist members of Congress still try to tear us apart, one shamelessly speaking of a "national divorce."

This ignorant woman roams the halls with a vengeance, in cahoots with weak Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Mean-spirited members burning down the House are waging a war within the walls.

Georgia and Arizona, we're looking at you for the worst offenders.

During Abraham Lincoln's presidency, the Capitol was never attacked by an armed mob of Americans against our government. Experts and witnesses agree: the strife Trump set off almost upset the apple cart of democracy.

The civil war writ small is Biden's burden.

In the War writ large, Lincoln had only four years to save the Union and end slavery, the Southern evil or "peculiar institution."

Lincoln was murdered as the final casualty of the Civil War he won, the war he refused to lose.

In its midst, he freed four million enslaved people. In the bittersweet spring of 1865, he laid his life down for freedom, Biden's clarion call. The nation was plunged into grief like never before.

There is much more to thank Lincoln for. He was the first president with a public sense of humor, loving to tell jokes and stories from when he was a lawyer riding on the prairie court circuit. He was beloved for his man-of-the-people ways, Biden's gift.

In this way, Lincoln humanized himself and connected with juries and audiences, as in the famed Lincoln-Douglas Illinois Senate debates in 1858. (He lost but defeated "Little Giant" Stephen Douglas for the presidency in 1860.)

Not for Lincoln the lofty, remote pedestal of previous presidents. From the first speech he gave, he struck grave notes that grasped that breaking apart the Union violated the covenant of the constitution.

In the Gettysburg Address and his inaugural speeches, Lincoln invented modern presidential prose: spare, clear and cutting like glass straight to meaning, no flowery phrases. We can read him easily as if he was speaking to us.

His heart and humanity are much like Carter's, sprung from humble farming roots.

Finally, Lincoln took two trading trips down the Mississippi River as a young man, piloting a flatboat about a thousand miles from Indiana to New Orleans. He navigated the wide swift bends with one partner.

The early experience marked Lincoln's psyche and presidency. Seeing brutal slave markets and lavish plantations branded a personal hatred for slavery.

The Mississippi didn't just divide North and South. The iconic American river divided East and West for young Lincoln, with big dreams, but no money or formal schooling.

As a presidential contender and a railroad lawyer, Lincoln's main stand was that future Western states must always be free of slavery's stain.

Lincoln is the greatest president in the pantheon. But he, Biden and Carter would have a lot to talk about.

© Creators, 2023