I wrote a piece in the New York Post the other day on the Lincoln cultural program, if you will:

We need a revival of what the great historian of the Whigs, Daniel Walker Howe, calls Lincoln’s “preoccupations with self-control, order, rationality, industriousness.” But no one supports such a revival, really. Democrats are too concerned with being non-judgmental, whereas Republicans focus on economic freedom while neglecting cultural orderliness. As long as this is so, we won’t be the America of boundless opportunity that exists in our national imagination.

I took another swing at the Lincoln haters in the Daily Beast:

If DiLorenzo the friend of civil rights is appalled when Lincoln falls short of contemporary standards of racial tolerance, surely he must be heartened and inspired when he transcends the limits of his own day, when he defends the natural rights of blacks and their humanity, when he denounces the “tendency to dehumanize the negro – to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man.”
But on this and so much else, DiLorenzo is silent. In his rancid book-length indictment of Lincoln, The Real Lincoln, he favorably cites John C. Calhoun without pausing to inquire whether the South Carolinian might, perhaps, just have been a little bit racist.

I get the KJL treatment today. We discuss how Lincoln was more a half-dollar person, than an axe person:

He told a story in the White House that captured this. When he was a teenager, Lincoln had built a little boat that idled at an Ohio River landing. Two men approached in carriages. They wanted to meet a steamboat coming down river. Seeing Lincoln’s boat, they asked if he’d take them and their trunks out to meet the steamboat. Lincoln obliged and, when they were about to steam off, yelled out that they had forgotten to pay him. They each tossed a silver half-dollar onto the bottom of his little boat. Lincoln had, as he put it, “earned my first dollar.”
“In these days it seems to me a trifle,” he recalled, “but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day — that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time.”

I did a Press Pass interview about the book with David Gregory.

Finally, Parade magazine had a little squib on the book over the weekend.