Abraham & Barack

It seems you can’t swing a dead cat in Illinois these days without hitting a columnist from one of the big coastal dailies.

David Brooks of the NY Times filed from the state capital of Springfield this morning after sitting down with Senator Barack Obama, while Gregory Rodriguez of the LA Times reported from, one might assume, a truckstop outside of Cairo earlier in the month, having just driven the length of the state, north to south.

The pieces covered completely different topics, but one passage in each stood out. While Rodriguez lays out the supposed red-blue cultural divide in the US as more of a North-South thing, he offers up Abraham Lincoln representative to the different cultures clashing in Illinois. He writes:

Born on the Kentucky frontier to Virginian parents, Honest Abe never lost his backwoods folksiness. But he turned his back on the South. He arrived in Illinois a country bumpkin and, in part because of the cultural influences and intellectual outlets around him, left a Northern politician

Finishing this, I turned to the Brooks’ piece about Obama, another tall, skinny guy from Illinois. (I don’t have a link as it’s on the pay part of the site, but it can be summed up by the first sentence: “Barack Obama should run for president.”)

In a graph Dems are sure to love—after all, Brooks is the conservative conservatives love to hate—he writes of the dual-nature he sees in Obama. It sounds a bit like the Rodriguez’s take on Lincoln pushed forward 150 years, a man from more than one place thrust into the national political limelight:

Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self — Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago — and he takes that conversation outward into the world.

Obviously, Obama isn’t Lincoln. But what else is there to get excited about in the next two years?