From HuffPost Hill:
OBAMA CAN'T STOP REFRESHING HUFFPOST, GETTING ANGRY - The Obama campaign released a video this weekend and the upshot is that the president thinks we're really, really mean to him. "If you read the Huffington Post," he tells a small group of students, "you'd think that I was some right-wing tool of Wall Street." And then a bit later: "Abraham Lincoln. Here's a guy who didn't believe in slavery, but his first priority was keeping the union. I've got a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in my office, and if you read through it, most of the document is those states and areas where emancipation doesn't apply because those folks are allied with the union so they can keep their slaves. Here's a wartime President making a compromise around the greatest moral issue that the country ever faced, because he understood that his job was to win the war and maintain the union. Can you imagine how the Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. 'Lincoln Sells Out Slaves.'"They're referring to this. I've written about this enough times that I don't want to beat a dead horse (too much). But the President needs to realize that it's not just politically-illiterate country bumpkins (or Ivory Tower intellectuals) who are concerned about his negotiating skills. It's people with decades of experience getting things done in this town, people who actually know how the game is played first hand. We aren't critical because we don't understand. We're critical because we understand better than anybody how successful you can be in Washington if you're willing to get in someone's face.
We searched "Lincoln Sells Out Slaves" in HuffPost's archives and, in Obama's defense, turned up this piece from late 1862: [THE ACTUAL SCREEN GRAB]
LINCOLN SELLS OUT SLAVES - WASHINGTON -- President Abraham Lincoln intends to issue a proclamation emancipating slaves in states rebelling against the Union on Tuesday, senior administration officials tell the Huffington Post. The proclamation, said sources who'd been briefed on its contents, will not apply to slaves in certain states and counties that the president has determined are not in rebellion, a sop to pro-slavery interests at peace with the Union. Abolitionist congressional Republicans also took their party's president to task, questioning why Lincoln would free slaves in territories the Union does not control, but leave them enslaved in areas where Lincoln could, in fact, free them. "The president caved," a Senate Republican leadership aide told HuffPost.
OBAMA 2011: From Obama's lecture: "One of the challenges of this generation is, I think, to understand that the nature of our democracy and the nature of our politics is to marry principle to a political process. That means you don't get a 100% of what you want. You don't get it if you are the majority; you don't get it if you are in the minority."
OBAMA 2008: Remember this? "We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told that we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people. Yes we can." Or, maybe not!
