I Know Abraham Lincoln and You Sir Are No Abraham Lincoln

In his SOTU speech last week, President Obama once again linked himself to Abraham Lincoln when he stated the following:

I’m a Democrat.  But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed:  That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.  (Applause.)  That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and states.  That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work.  That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program. 

However, Dr. Harry Jaffa, the greatest living Lincoln scholar, disagrees.  Here is what he had to say:

Professor Jaffa noted that this quotation leaves out a great deal. The 93-year-old Jaffa recited the full statement from Lincoln’s speech, “The Nature and Objects of Government, with Special Reference to Slavery” (July 1, 1854) by memory:

“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

Notice the difference? The emphasis is on the need to have done, not on government doing the action. “That distinction was missing from his quotation,” Jaffa explains. Yet Obama has repeatedly invoked this misleading Lincoln quotation on both the campaign trail and during his presidency.

Lincoln's politics revolved around natural rights, or rights that are antecedent to the creation of any government whatsoever; these rights are true everywhere because they derive from a permanent human nature.  Modern liberalism completely rejects this because, as they say, who are we to force our values on anyone else?    

Jaffa on Lincoln's political philosophy and the difference between small government and limited government (I also talked about this topic in this post):

Now, to be fair, Jaffa stresses that the founders’ vision isn’t for a small government, but a limited one necessary to protect its powers. Part of Lincoln’s genius, he said, was combining Jeffersonian ideals with Hamiltonian policy. Like the good Whig he once was, Lincoln favored infrastructure projects as a means of promoting the “American system” to increase trade.

[...]

But conservatives, especially libertarians, have it wrong when they call for smaller government, Jaffa argues, because while the Founders believed in limited government, they often also favored measures such as levying tariffs, allowing the federal government to assume the debt of the states, and creating the National Bank. ”If Ron Paul were president, then, we wouldn’t have purchased Louisiana. Thomas Jefferson did,” Jaffa said.

If you are unfamiliar with Dr. Jaffa's work, the last paragraph would seem to indicate that the even the Founders themselves were unconcerned with the Constitution when push came to shove.  Not true at all.  Jaffa is merely indicating is that there is huge difference between small government, or the government we had previously under the Articles of Confederation, and the limited government the Founders created under the Constitution--one of enumerated powers but energetic enough in its administration to properly be called a government.