Matt Yglesias posts the following query:
So has anyone actually read [Team of Rivals
]? I think it’s a book I’ve been known to pretend to read in the past. In general, I’d be more comfortable with a president drawing lessons from serious historical scholarship rather than these kind of pop histories they sell in airports.
As it happens, I've read
Team of Rivals from cover to cover, and even
recommended it to the presidential candidates months before it was hip to do so. Here's what I wrote then:
The idea of highlighting Lincoln’s greatness by examining how he treated both his political rivals (William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edwin Stanton, and Edward Bates) and his generals (McClellan, Grant, Meade) is ingenious. Goodwin suggests two sources of Lincoln’s greatness: his ego, which allowed him to tolerate with grace the machinations of his cabinet, and his political acumen, which allowed him to move on the slavery issue in such a way that he led the country without overreaching and antagonizing public opinion in the Union. This latter, populist skill is usually looked at askance in political commentary, so it was facinating to see a great man use it to good purposes.
How does the
Team of Rivals analogy apply here? Well, Obama certainly has a healthy ego, and based on his behavior to date, seems perfectly comfortable being the calm at the center of the storm. That said, I think there are two important differences at work here:
1. Lincoln's team of rivals consisted of politicians who actively pursued the Presidency, and thought themselves the political superior of Lincoln. I'm not sure how well that applies here beyond Hillary Clinton. For example,
this FT story by Demetri Sevastopulo suggests that keeping on Bob Gates as SecDef mirrors, "the approach of Abraham Lincoln who appointed former rivals to his cabinet in 1861." But Gates has never run for the presidency, or expressed any desire to do so. Neither has Larry Summers, Tom Daschle, Eric Holder, or other rumored cabinet names (maybe John Kerry or Bill Richardson, but he would simply be displacing Clinton).
In other words, Obama's cabinet will likely contain a lot of smart, strong-willed individuals, but not necessarily more presidential aspirants than Lincoln. In other words, it would look an awful lot like... George W. Bush's first cabinet.
2. The bigger difference is that the federal government during the 1860s really was a cabinet government -- Lincoln had just a handful of staffers like John Hay - and no one like Rahm Emanuel. In contrast, as
Marc Ambinder has repeatedly pointed out, Obama seems to be much more focused on staffing the White House than his cabinet. So in contrast to Lincoln, Obama has more than his personal political skills at his disposal to manage his cabinet departments.
That said, it's pretty smart for Obama and his staff to spread this
meme around. First, it flatters all of his cabinet officers to think that they're like Seward, Salmon Chase
et al. Second, by invoking the metaphor, Obama gets to frame his administration as evoking both the great challenges of the Civil War period and the greatness of Lincoln.
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