Perry Steps in it again. This time over Abe Lincoln
Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 6:13 pm
So it continued last evening, when former Texas Gov. Rick Perry—a likely candidate for his party’s presidential nomination—addressed the Stafford County GOP Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner in Dover, New Hampshire.
There was just one problem: He got Lincoln backwards.
In footage released by American Bridge, the progressive super PAC that seems always to know in advance when a Republican candidate is about to trip over himself, Perry told the party faithful that “Abraham Lincoln read the Constitution, and he also read the Bill of Rights, and he got down to the Tenth Amendment, and he liked it. That Tenth Amendment that talks about these states, these laboratories of democracy. … The Tenth Amendment that the federal government is limited, its powers are limited by the Constitution.”
For armchair historians whose first instinct is to protest that Abraham Lincoln never called the states “laboratories of democracy,” it’s only fair to note that, moments later, Perry properly credited that metaphor to former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. But the rest of Perry’s homage betrays a regrettable ignorance of Lincoln’s political outlook.
Read more:http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/rick-perry-abraham-lincoln-115178.html#ixzz3RxMiOXTv
There was just one problem: He got Lincoln backwards.
In footage released by American Bridge, the progressive super PAC that seems always to know in advance when a Republican candidate is about to trip over himself, Perry told the party faithful that “Abraham Lincoln read the Constitution, and he also read the Bill of Rights, and he got down to the Tenth Amendment, and he liked it. That Tenth Amendment that talks about these states, these laboratories of democracy. … The Tenth Amendment that the federal government is limited, its powers are limited by the Constitution.”
For armchair historians whose first instinct is to protest that Abraham Lincoln never called the states “laboratories of democracy,” it’s only fair to note that, moments later, Perry properly credited that metaphor to former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. But the rest of Perry’s homage betrays a regrettable ignorance of Lincoln’s political outlook.
Read more:http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/rick-perry-abraham-lincoln-115178.html#ixzz3RxMiOXTv