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Lisa Van Dusen

September 24, 2008

For Sun Media

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Lincoln Memorial is pretty sparse on this gorgeous early Sunday morning in September, with just the security guards and a handful of German and Spanish tourists capturing the steps in family gaggles, photo by photo.

There are no school groups and, this being America, the locals are at church, so you can BlackBerry most of a column from the top step without being in anyone’s way.

When my daughter was little and we lived in Washington, we’d come here on Martin Luther King Day and talk about how these steps were built to honour one man who died for his dream of America, and were later made famous by another one.

I hadn’t planned on the ritual being that morbid, but that first day I was caught short by the reality that every five-year-old line of questioning led to the same ending.

Abraham Lincoln was called up by history to fight the Civil War to end slavery . . . then what happened?

King fought for civil rights and he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on a day just like this from that spot right there and there were so many people you couldn’t see a blade of grass between here and the Washington Monument . . . then what happened?

So, the focus got tilted toward the bravery angle.

Behind me, on either side of the exhausted man in the big chair, are engraved two of his speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural address.

It’s impossible to read them today, to think of Lincoln reminding a nation that it was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” without thinking of this election.

There’s an AP poll that says in an election as close as this one, racist attitudes among Independents and white voters in his own party could cost Barack Obama the presidency; that if he were white, he’d be running six points higher in the polls instead of in a dead heat with John McCain.

This issue was always going to matter, it was just a question of how far Obama would be able to navigate the gradations of comfort to discomfort once you factored out Republicans and people who disagree with him on particular issues before he hit a wall.

Now, there’s a number attached to that mystery margin of white Independents and Democrats who would have voted for him on the issues, but won’t because of his skin colour. It’s 2.5 per cent, which is larger than the margin that decided the 2004 election.

It’s easy to figure history judged Lincoln to be right as you’re sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead of the Jefferson Davis Memorial, but what goes into smaller, personal definitions of right and wrong doesn’t necessarily get less complicated over time.

It’s hard not to wonder what Lincoln would make of this moment and what history will make of this presidential election, less than three lifetimes after he won a war and lost his life over something human progress would no longer abide.

And it’s impossible to look out over the reflecting pool and the empty grass to the Washington monument and not wonder what King would think, less than one lifetime after he stood on that landing, of the confounding persistence of wrong ideas in the only country that could have produced such men.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.