LINCOLN

Today I saw LINCOLN at the Varsity with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup group, an appropriate movie for Remembrance Day.  It was pretty good, with smooth, unostentatious direction by Steven Spielberg.  Daniel Day-Lewis was convincing and likeable in the title role, and the depiction of his home life felt plausible.  Tony Kushner's fairly intelligent script is so focused on political maneuvering that the Civil War may seem peripheral. (I don't recall any mention of General Sherman's march through Georgia and into the heart of the Confederacy.) Tommy Lee Jones was a hoot as Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Congressman with the obvious wig.

Of course, what with last week's election, people are sure to see a subtext about the Obama presidency.  Kushner has said that Obama inherited a crisis bigger than any president faced since Lincoln. (Has he forgotten FDR's first hundred days?) Obama apparently wants to be a Lincoln--he spoke of appointing another "team of rivals" to his cabinet--and some of his admirers certainly want to see him as another Lincoln.

Yet deeds are more important than words, and when we consider deeds Obama pales next to the previous Illinois president.  What did his "team of rivals" rhetoric mean in practice?  This administration's leading domestic policy people all supported the banking deregulation that led to the 2008 crisis, while the leading foreign policy people all supported the equally ill-starred invasion of Iraq.  People who had opposed either are conspicuous by their absence at the top level.  In practice, the result was the dispiriting liberal phenomenon of "one-way balance," often seen in THE NEW YORK TIMES today.

If the Lincoln I saw in this movie had been dealing with health care reform, he would have stuck to the public option, forced a vote and won narrowly.  The Obama people, on the other hand, were poor negotiators and abandoned the public sector early on, though they clearly had the votes to pass it.  And Obamacare suffered from one compromise too many.