By David BlankenhornSpecial to The Los Angeles Times
Abraham Lincoln, who was born 210 years ago this month, was president during an era even more rancorous and polarized than our own. Yet he managed to navigate it — not in a way that pleased everyone or made him popular, but rather by keeping the good of the country always in his sights. His path has lessons for today’s leaders.
Lincoln’s political philosophy consisted of only a few ideas, and he believed that America itself was based on these ideas. He said in 1861 that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” In the same speech, he articulated what he believed to be the core promises of that document: that “liberty” was the American birthright and that in America and ultimately in the world “all should have an equal chance.”
He spoke of democracy the way the poet Walt Whitman did, as both our nation’s form of government and its special reason for existing.