The myth of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”
15 comments November 19th, 2008
As an inveterate Lincoln buff (I have scores of books about Honest Abe), I’ve taken great interest in all the media speculation of late concerning Barack Obama’s purported interest in emulating the manner in which Lincoln assembled his Cabinet.
The gist of all this, if you don’t know, is that Lincoln appointed a bunch of his former political rivals to Cabinet posts in an admirable gesture of bipartisanship. Obama is said to be set on following much the same course.
The textbook for this strategy is historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling book of a few years ago, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”
I loved that book and took encouragement from word that Obama is bent on using Lincoln’s recipe for making a Cabinet.
But alas, historian Matthew Pinsker has a COLUMN in the Los Angeles Times in which he submits that Lincoln’s team of rivals was a failure.
Oh, well. That doesn’t mean Obama can’t make the formula work.