A Familiar Precedent For a President-Elect

But Obama's aspirations to become Lincolnesque are hardly original. Many presidents have tried to summon up the man.

Theodore Roosevelt, who as a young boy witnessed Lincoln's funeral, was such a fanatic that when he won the presidency in 1904, historians said, he procured a lock of Lincoln's beard and put it in a ring that he wore at the inauguration.

"It's very natural, it seems to me, that Lincoln would be a model for any president who has the slightest historical consciousness," said Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. "If you are going to identify with a president, you're probably not going to pick Millard Fillmore."

Franklin D. Roosevelt quoted Lincoln to justify the New Deal. Two decades later, Dwight D. Eisenhower quoted Lincoln to justify a smaller federal government. Of course, there was Richard M. Nixon, who at times of despair would retreat to the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House, and once ventured to the Lincoln Memorial in the dark of night to stand beneath the towering statue of Abe.

George W. Bush has read at least three histories of Lincoln, including Goodwin's. "Lincoln is one of his fascinations," said Gaddis, whom Bush summoned along with other scholars to the White House in 2005 for a private afternoon discussion of Lincoln.

Lincoln, who steered the nation through its darkest days, preserved the Union and emancipated the slaves, holds a particular appeal for presidents governing in times of national crisis.

"Every president in the Oval Office sits and thinks about Lincoln," said historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University, "because no matter how bad you've got it, he had it worse."

Obama, however, seems to have begun thinking about Lincoln long before he got to the Oval Office.

His favorite image of Lincoln is of a frail, "rough-faced" president looking sorrowful, except that his mouth "is turned ever so slightly into a smile. The smile doesn't negate the sorrow. But it alters tragedy into grace," Obama wrote in an essay published in Time in 2005. "On trying days," he said, "the portrait, a reproduction of which hangs in my office, soothes me; it always asks me questions."

Obama compared Lincoln's rise from poverty, and mastery of language and law, to his own biography, but he also noted that Lincoln was an imperfect man. He often had a morose demeanor and indecisive temperament. "It is precisely those imperfections -- and the painful self-awareness of those failings etched in every crease of his face and reflected in those haunted eyes -- that make him so compelling," Obama wrote.

After reading "Team of Rivals," Obama called Goodwin. The senator wanted to talk about Lincoln, so the author met him in Washington. "You really could see even then a kind of confidence and a thoughtfulness," she said of Obama. (Goodwin's book is back on the paperback bestseller list, although she wonders whether it would have caught on in 2005 had she chosen one of the other titles she was considering: "The Great Unifier," "The American Colossus" and "Master Among Men." She said she always wanted a title more poetic than "Team of Rivals," and was fond of "Master Among Men," but quickly realized "we couldn't use 'Master' because of slavery.")

Former congressman and judge Abner Mikva, a friend and early political mentor of Obama's, said the president-elect identifies more with Lincoln in private than he lets on in public. "He doesn't talk about that because it would sound like he's aggrandizing himself in comparing himself to one of our great presidents," said Mikva, who urged Obama to speak of Lincoln in his announcement speech in Springfield by declaring, "Seven score and four years ago." But he said Obama's campaign advisers nixed the idea.