Dear Mr. President

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln had accepted the challenge to run against Stephen Douglas who was up for re-election. Lincoln challenged Douglas to many different debates and ended up having seven all total.

Standing side by side, you would have thought it was the sun and moon up there on the stage. The two couldn’t have been more different if they’d tried. Douglas was a man of small stature, he was a heavier-set man, cocky, quite arrogant, well-dressed, and spoke with much eloquence. Mr. Lincoln, on the other hand, was the complete opposite. Lincoln was very tall (around 6’4), skinny (180 at most), he dressed in well-worn clothes, and when he spoke he used words that his uneducated family would have been able to understand, he had a down-home feel to him.

This situation reminds me very much of our current president. Mr. Obama is well-known for his eloquence-even though he reads what has been written for him on a teleprompter- he wears all the right name brand suits, he tends to believe that if you don’t agree with him, your obviously the one who’s wrong, and that’s where his arrogance and cockiness seem to show the most.

Maybe our new president should take some much needed advice from one of the greatest presidents in American history. People seem to respond better to the more down to earth feel that Mr. Lincoln appeared to have down to a pat. Lincoln was able to gain support, not by what he was wearing or by the fancy words he spoke, but by his down-home feel, and how he was able to relate to everyday people.

President Obama could learn a lot from our former president, he might gain more support from the people that disagree with his policies the most, if he opened his eyes and his heart to things that are different and foreign to him. I’m not totally optimistic, though, that Obama will actually ever leave his prideful ways to hear somebody else out.

But as shown by the Lincoln and Douglas campaign, people relate more to down-home people than others who feel as if they are smarter than the rest of the world. I’m sorry Mr. President, but I disagree with the way you treat the same average people who elected you into the position you now hold.