I shouldn't overlook this important LA Times op-ed piece, even though it ran yesterday. Civil War historian Matthew Pinsker writes that Lincoln's famous Team of Rivals, a phrase already beaten into the ground, maybe isn't such a great model for Obama and maybe Doris Goodwin airbrushed her history a little:
Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust...
...Over the years, it has become easy to forget that hard edge and the once bad times that nearly destroyed a president. Lincoln's Cabinet was no team. His rivals proved to be uneven as subordinates. Some were capable despite their personal disloyalty, yet others were simply disastrous.
Lincoln was a political genius, but his model for Cabinet-building should stand more as a cautionary tale than as a leadership manual.
Worth pondering, all right. I'm still just not very persuaded this ToR thing is such a grand idea.
