Should Abraham Lincoln Be President Obama's Idol?

I found this interesting take on President Obama's fascination with Abraham Lincoln.Although he is credited with freeing the slaves,some have ascertained that Abraham Lincoln was a racist at heart!In fact,they use the quote in this video to illustrate just how President Lincoln really felt about black equality.It is ironic that President Obama idolizes a man who stated that he didn't believe that blacks should have social or political equality.Here's more on the true Abraham Lincoln from USA Today:

"Born 200 years ago Thursday in a log cabin on the Kentucky frontier, Abraham Lincoln today sits deified in a marble temple on the National Mall in Washington. Americans are still trying to figure out how he came such a long way, and what kind of man made the trip.
Having saved the Union, freed the slaves and redefined freedom, Lincoln was struck down in his hour of triumph. He is the most compelling figure in U.S. history, the subject of about 16,000 books in English, more than anyone except Jesus and Shakespeare."

On President Obama's fascination with Abraham Lincoln:

"President Obama repeatedly invoked Lincoln during the campaign, praising his wisdom and humility, and then followed his fellow Illinoisan's example by picking a "team of rivals" for his Cabinet.

The inauguration's theme was "A New Birth of Freedom," echoing the words of the Gettysburg Address, and the oath was administered on the Bible that Lincoln used 148 years earlier. On Thursday, Obama will speak in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln is buried.

In an interview last month with USA TODAY, Obama said that when he sits down to write a speech, "I'm hearing certain voices in my head. … Lincoln's one of them."

And on the race issue:

"• Lincoln the "racist": Did the man who freed the slaves really believe they were equal?

Lincoln's racial attitudes kept evolving, but he harbored some of the prejudices of his time, according to Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

Lincoln, lauded for generations as "The Great Emancipator," freed the slaves primarily to cripple the South's wartime economy, Holzer says. The Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, did not even apply to all slaves — just those in the Confederacy.

Although Lincoln opposed slavery, he favored only gradual abolition, with the government compensating slaveholders and encouraging former slaves to immigrate to other countries, lest they stay in the USA as second-class citizens, says Tom Schwartz, the Illinois state historian.

When he was younger, Lincoln, like many of his contemporaries, told "darkie" jokes and used the "N" word to describe the race issue, Holzer says.

With the rise of the civil rights movement, African-Americans — who'd revered Lincoln for a century — began to examine this less admirable side of "Father Abraham." Some came to believe, as Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett Jr. put it in a 2000 book, that Lincoln was "forced into glory" by wartime demands.

Now, there has been a backlash against the backlash. Clinton, for instance, says she found in researching her book that Lincoln took his son Tad to the home of a black family in Washington for "a play date." Burlingame says he found a lost speech by abolitionist Frederick Douglass — who'd once called Lincoln a "slave hound" — praising him shortly after his death as "the black man's president."

"No doubt he was a racist, but if you look at him in the context of his time, he's so far ahead of other politicians," says Vernon Burton, a retired University of Illinois historian. "Look at Stephen Douglas (Lincoln's Democratic opponent for U.S. Senate in 1858 and president in 1860). His whole platform boiled down to white supremacy. Lincoln changed and grew, especially as president."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the entire article here.