CBS:
From the start of his political career, Obama seems to have modeled himself on Lincoln. Both were born in other states - Hawaii for Obama, Kentucky for Lincoln - before settling in Illinois. Each became a lawyer then served in the state legislature before serving a single term in Congress. Each rocketed onto the national political stage with powerful speeches and became commander-in-chief without any military experience.
For Lincoln, the turning point was his 1857 speech at the Illinois state house for preserving the union. "A house divided cannot stand, Lincoln said, drawing inspiration from scripture. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free."
The next year, Lincoln's debates with Stephen Douglas in a U.S. Senate race he lost placed him at the center of the nation's most pressing question. (Two years later, he would edge out Douglas for the presidency.)...Obama has learned from Lincoln, and what he's learned is how to hold a civil debate without giving up your main position, meaning you don't have to put your finger in your enemy's face and scold him. You can have dignity and composure and still win an argument," Brinkley says.
Newsweek:
It is the season to compare Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln. Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing. Obama, like Lincoln and unlike most modern politicians, even writes his own speeches, or at least drafts the really important ones—by hand, on yellow legal paper—such as his remarkably honest speech on race during the Reverend Wright imbroglio last spring.
But what did Lincoln say in that 1958 speech?
According to Kearney Smith in the TLS, this:-
In debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858 at Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln said: “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary”.
Lincoln repeated these beliefs several times. In his First Inaugural Address in 1861, he said he had no “purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery, in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so”. Instead, Lincoln dedicated most of the speech to denying that States could legally secede from the Union by arguing that the Union was older than the Constitution.
Lincoln’s “solution” for black people in the United States was to send them back to Africa. He toyed with several plans to do that, which prompted William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, to denounce him: “President Lincoln may colonize himself if he choose, but it is an impertinent act, on his part, to propose the getting rid of those who are as good as himself”.
Oops.
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