Ben Wolfgang
The Washington Times
10/31/2013
It may be little more than a blip on Washington’s radar screen, but President Obama’s decision to be a no-show at an upcoming ceremony to mark the 150th anniversary of online canadian pharmacy Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has touched off a firestorm in Pennsylvania.
Local newspapers Thursday excoriated the president, a noted admirer of the 16th president, for skipping the historic occasion.
A journalist at Harrisburg’s Patriot News said Mr. Obama doesn’t have “the stones” to attend; York’s Daily Record newspaper called the decision “unacceptable” and said “Mr. Obama’s retreat from Gettysburg will linger long and bitter.”
The Gettysburg Times reported that local officials in and around the town have spent months preparing — in vain — for a potential visit from Mr. Obama, who twice carried Pennsylvania in the presidential election (by 11 percentage points in 2008 and five in 2012).
Instead, the White House will send Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to the Nov. 19 event, which will be held at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.
She will be joined as keynote speaker by renowned historian James McPherson…
The article continues at The Washington Times.
Related: Do We Know Exact Words of the Gettysburg Address?
…Brief as Lincoln’s speech was, many newspaper reports paraphrased or outright butchered it. In his new book, “Writing the Gettysburg Address,” Martin P. Johnson argues that the fledgling “wire service” played a key role in ensuring that most Americans experienced the true power and poetry of their president’s words at a time when he desperately wanted to reach them.
“The Gettysburg Address was not necessarily going to be an important text, if the first version published had been such a truncated version,” he says.
But 150 years later, the debate continues over exactly what Lincoln said that day — and why it matters…
…Many who recite the address place the emphasis on the prepositions “of,” ”by” and “for.” But Gilbert, no longer preoccupied with the mechanics of note-taking, was able to truly listen to what the president was saying, and how he said it — and he insisted Lincoln’s focus was “the people.”…
Read the whole thing.
When President Obama came under fire Tuesday for choosing to skip the ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a senior White House aide tweeted sarcastically that ‘it didn’t work schedule-wise’ because his boss was too busy working to fix the Obamacare website.
‘Serious question,’ National Journal editorial director Ron Fournier wrote to White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer on Twitter: ‘What is on his schedule that is more important than Gettysburg anniversary?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Pfeiffer snarked in reply, ‘there’s this whole website thing that someone suggested might destroy the Dem[ocratic] Party.’
In what quickly became a Twitter free-for-all, other journalists pointed out that the president’s official schedule for Tuesday didn’t mention any meetings related to the Affordable Care Act…
