You painted McClellan as “inept” which he most certainly was not. McClellan was a wizard of logistics who built the damn Army of the Potomac and instilled it with confidence after Bull Run. Clearly though, he was not an effective battlefield commander by any means. But someone who was truly “inept” at command could never have displayed the administrative prowess that McClellan did.

He is not an apt comparison to Obama either. McClellan’s primary failing was his supreme and often times ludicrous caution……(sending cables back to Washington putting the rebel army at 200,000 men, for instance). But he wasn’t actively working for the Confederate States.

Obama isn’t cautious, he is deceptive. He isn’t cowardly, he is enacting the agenda he has wanted all along. Obama isn’t playing for the tea party, but he isn’t playing for anyone making under $200,000 a year either…..You know, the people the democrats largely claim to represent?

Buchanan was the consummate insider. He had been trying for years to become president, and more than one Democratic president went out of his way to send Buchanan to another continent to remove him as a rival. Obama, in contrast, certainly campaigned as the opposite of an insider, accusing Hilary Clinton of being “Bush/Cheney Lite,” which may have been true, but certainly does seem true of the Obama Administration, at least in respect of Wall Street policy, war policy, and the power of the executive (I’m not even sure it’s “Lite).

I think the real similarity is between the Tea Party (or, more specifically, the people with power and money who seek the rise of the Tea Party and politicians like Paul Ryan) and the “Slave Power.

A contemporary analog of Lincoln would need a contemporary analog of Lincoln’s Republican Party, which was then still new, energetic, and guided by fairly coherent and strongly held beliefs as to how a free country should work. That their platform later crashed when faced with the realities of free soil, free labor, and free men in an industrializing, corporatizing nation willing to turn its back on African-Americans in the south shouldn’t overshadow the fact that as a set of guiding principles in the 1850s and 1860s it was far better than the alternative.

Without an analogous party or movement like that today, it doesn’t really matter what Lincoln’s analog would do. You’re probably better off hoping it’s more like 1850 than 1860, and that there’s a contemporary analog of a younger Lincoln waiting, working, preparing for the struggle ahead. Fortunately, in the world of analogies, that’s an easy switch to make.

Yours is probably better, but the analogy I keep thinking of from roughly the same period is that Obama is to liberals like George McClellan was to the Union: on the right side, basically (he was in the military sense, but of course he was not actually a Republican or anti-slavery), but so cowardly and inept that he blew chance after chance to win and had to be replaced to get anything done. And, of course, McClellan ultimately betrayed his cause by running a campaign in 1864 that would have been tantamount to surrender (he pretended it wasn’t, but I think he mostly fooled himself); luckily he lost.

Oh, and just by the by, since you said 1855 more than once: I’m probably missing something, but you do remember that Buchanan was president from March, 1857 to March, 1861, right?

What would the contemporary analog of Lincoln do?