Lincoln's heir

One sure sign of the success of Barack Obama's second inaugural address on Monday is that right and left shared a common assessment of its impact. Conservatives decried the "amazing" speech (Charles Krauthammer) as "among the best of the past half-century" (David Brooks) precisely because liberals found Obama's "expansive case for progressive governance, grounded in the language of the Founding Fathers" (Greg Sargent) to be "startling" and "the most sustainedly 'progressive' statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage" (James Fallows). Right-wing protests that the 44th president marked "the end of Reaganism" (Krauthammer) and instead augured that "the era of liberalism is back" (Mitch McConnell) testify to the magnitude of Obama's triumph on Inauguration Day.

But for the Party of Lincoln, the most appalling development at the Capitol Monday was the realization that Barack Obama may have established himself as the heir to its namesake. That is, 150 years after the Gettysburg Address, President Obama followed Abraham Lincoln in elevating the Declaration of Independence as both the promise and the measure of the American project. And by committing the United States to the proposition that women, African-Americans, immigrants, gay Americans'that all Americans'are all equally members of our nation's expanding circle of liberty, Obama like Lincoln resolved that America "shall have a new birth of freedom."

Dedicating the new national cemetery at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, President Lincoln quickly redefined the meanings of both the Civil War and the American creed itself. (For more background, see Garry Wills' classic, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.)

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.

In his second inaugural address this week, President Obama, too, from the very outset enshrined the Declaration as the ideal towards which America must always strive:

What makes us exceptional -- what makes us American -- is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

With the very survival of the nation in jeopardy, Lincoln pleaded for Americans honoring the Union fallen "to be to be dedicated here to the unfinished work" and "take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion." But in this much less dangerous moment, President Obama similarly explained:

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