After 7 years in the White House, President Obama still hasn’t learned his lesson about Republicans.
Case in point: his conclusion to last night’s State of the Union address.
Looking back on his time as commander-in-chief, the president regretted that he had not done more to change our country’s broken political system.
Someone with the political “gifts” of Lincoln or FDR might have been able to do so, he said, but not him.
The idea here is that Lincoln and FDR were great presidents because they brought people together and forced them to make compromises.
In other words, President Obama thinks that Lincoln and FDR were great presidents because they were “bipartisan."
This is just flat-out wrong.
What made Lincoln and FDR great wasn’t the fact that they made compromises with their enemies; what made them great was fact that they fought their enemies and supported policies that were right, even if they made people on the other side of the aisle really, really angry.
This probably sounds a little bizarre to some people.
Bipartisanship, or at least the myth of bipartisanship, is so ingrained in our culture that many Americans forget what it really took for great Presidents to become great.
This is especially true in the case of President Lincoln.
Although his leanings were always towards compromise, the things we most remember him for -- fighting the Civil War, signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and passing the 13th Amendment -- happened when he stopped being a moderate and embraced the radicals in his Party who wanted him to become more, not less, partisan.
FDR, similarly, was the opposite of bipartisan.
He was the ultimate fighter and he kicked Republicans in the butt and took their lunch money, too.
Listening to his speeches now is actually pretty shocking.
