Obama compared himself to Lincoln.
From the Paul interview: "...the Civil War was to prove that we had a very, very strong centralized federal government and that's what it did. It rejected the notion that states were a sovereign nation.
The people who disagree want to turn around and say, "Oh, yes, those guys just wanted to protect slavery." But that's just a cop-out if you look at this whole idea of what happened in our country because Lincoln really believed in the centralized state. He was a Hamiltonian type and objected to everything Jefferson wanted....."
In those ways Obama is Lincolnisn / Hamiltonian.
Not saying we are headed for Civil War, just noting the interesting perspective given the recent events and underlying agendas.
Thanks for the reasoned post. I was reading down the entire thread and thought that the full moon was affecting people....................................
That's Ron Paul's line and he picked it up from Rothbard and Rockwell. But Lincoln was a great admirer of Jefferson author of the Declaration of Independence and the Northwest ordinance:
All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Lincoln was not particularly a fan of Alexander Hamilton. Lincoln's hero, Henry Clay, had been a Jeffersonian, though he supported tariffs, a national bank, and public works.
Most Jeffersonians did come around to supporting those things during the Madison and Monroe Administrations. It was Andrew Jackson who brought back some of the Jeffersonian purism that had been lost over time.
The way that Paul and DiLorenzo make use of Jefferson and Hamilton has more to do with the politics of the 20th than that of the 18th or 19th century. It would be more honest to recognize that "pure" Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism don't exist in the real world. As Jefferson himself put it:
[E]very difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.
Lumping Hamilton and Lincoln and Obama together and contrasting them with some pure Jeffersonianism that doesn't exist is just silly.