Obama and Lincoln
Yesterday over at the Milestone Documents Blog, we saw the biggest response in the site’s history to a fairly innocuous post: In the news: Presidential debates. Such is the power of link journalism, I guess. Of course, coming as it did on the heels of Wednesday’s debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, the post was well positioned to take advantage of the incredibly high interest level about the current presidential election. Call me an incurable optimist (and my staff often does), but I find it hard to be too pessimistic about the state of our country when so many people are so passionate about an election. Just one example: several sites are reporting that Obama’s campaign is on the verge of reporting its September fundraising figures, and that those figures may come in at or above $100 million. That’s just astonishing.
A final note on Obama: One of the best pieces I’ve read recently is over at the A. Lincoln Blog, where the historian Brian Dirck comments on the high expectations that Obama is now facing and relates those expectations to the ones faced by Abraham Lincoln, both before and after he took office.