As A Writer, Obama's No Lincoln

The teleprompters at President Barack Obama's inaugural address were still powering down when British literary heavyweight Jonathan Raban deemed Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln." Raban was hardly alone in this enthusiasm. Later that year, Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, told a conference of (sigh!) grant writers, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln." Never mind that Landesman, an Obama appointee, overlooked Grant, Wilson, Hoover, and Nixon among other book writers or that Lincoln never wrote a book. The point was made: Obama was Lincoln's literary heir apparent. In a speech to an SRO crowd of historians in late 2010, Harvard's James Kloppenberg upped the adulatory ante. He described the president as "gifted," a "genius," a man of "exceptional intelligence," one who writes "brilliantly and...(Read Full Article)

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