As you maybe, possibly, have heard, the president of our country last week fired the person who was leading the investigation into collusion between his campaign team and a foreign power seeking to interfere with our democratic process.
Let’s get something straight: FBI Director James Comey deserved to be fired for his absolute mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email matter — not that Trump cares one iota about that — and, at the same time, it was an absolute scandal that Trump fired him now, in a bald-faced attempt to derail the aforementioned investigation just when it was, in the words of an FBI source, “accelerating.”
That was last week. But let’s take a trip back to the halcyon days of spring 2013. Barack Obama was fresh off a clear, decisive re-election victory over Mitt Romney, an election in which his party also held the U.S. Senate — remember that the Democrats lost the Senate after only two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
With a recalcitrant Republican-dominated House, the prospects for major progressive legislation, however, were quite thin. On health care, among other issues, President Obama had tried to win over Republicans by making substantive policy compromises, and got essentially nothing to show for it. Nevertheless, Obama tried one more time to show just how bipartisan he was. The result was James Comey.
The reaction from the New York Times — this is a news article, not an opinion piece — was exactly what the Obama administration had hoped for:
By choosing Mr. Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship.
These kind of sentiments abounded, and Comey was easily confirmed by the Senate. To his credit, Kevin Drum predicted: “if Obama thinks that nominating Comey will be seen as some kind of bipartisan olive branch, he’s crazy.” President Obama had also been considering Lisa Monaco, then his counter terrorism advisor, but instead decided to pick someone who might appeal to members of both parties.
In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was running for re-election. His vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was a staunch opponent of slavery who had, like Lincoln himself, strongly opposed its expansion westward in the years leading up to the Civil War. In a bid to gain the support of pro-war Democrats, Lincoln dumped Hamlin in favor of the only U.S. senator from a Confederate state who had rejected secession: Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson. As with Obama’s nomination of Comey, this was a strong statement about bipartisanship.
Lincoln won 22 of 24 states. Johnson became vice president. Although he had come out against slavery and had freed his own slaves — albeit after having convinced Lincoln not to include Tennessee in the Emancipation Proclamation — Johnson remained a Southern white supremacist in every other way. In April 1865 that Southern white supremacist became president instead of Hannibal Hamlin, a man whose views on black equality were as progressive if not more so than Abraham Lincoln’s.
Lincoln’s decision, along with an assassin’s bullet, robbed the United States of the unified, federal leadership necessary to make the gains promised by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments stick, at least to a much greater degree than they ultimately did. Obama put in place the man who turned President Hillary Clinton into President Donald Trump. The parallels are not perfect, but the motivation in both cases was essentially the same.
Abraham Lincoln was the greatest president our country has been blessed to have. He saved the union and presided over the abolishment of slavery as well as the extension of the franchise and equal rights to African Americans, even though Jim Crow undid much of that progress. Lincoln got a lot of help, of course, not least of which was from those self-same African Americans who fought and bled for the causes of liberty and equality he had evoked at Gettysburg. But no other president did more, gave more, to help this country move closer to becoming the place Langston Hughes swore it someday “will be.”
Barack Obama may not have been our second greatest president, but he surely has earned a spot very high up on the list. Beyond the transformative effect of simply being the first non-white leader of our country, his policy accomplishments are tremendously impressive. To start with, he helped avert the worst effects of the gravest economic crisis since the Depression, and capped a century of efforts with a law that made health coverage accessible to tens of millions — even though the Supreme Court limited its reach and Donald Trump may now overturn a significant part of it.
However, as great as both of these presidents were, both knowingly made the same crucial, unforced error — an error which put those with whom they fundamentally disagreed into a position to block or reverse much of the vital progress they made. Conservatives never seem to fall for the siren song of seeking praise for bipartisanship, at least not when it really matters. Progressives have to learn the lesson here: Putting someone from the other party into a potentially powerful position brings no political benefits. Furthermore, it might just end up giving that person the power to make history.
