Obama criticized for Gettysburg snub
Not attending anniversary of Lincoln speech
It’s the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s immortal address at Gettysburg next week, but Barack Obama won’t be there to mark the occasion.
The 44 th U.S. president won’t be travelling the 187 kilometres to the site of the bloody Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania. Instead, he’s sending Sally Jewell, the interior secretary.
Officials in the rural town are doing their best to put on a brave face — especially after rumours over the past year had indicated Mr. Obama would be there.
“I thought he was going to come,” Bill Troxell, Gettysburg’s 86-year-old mayor, told ABC News. “From every bit of information I had, I expected him to be here.”
But the White House recently announced Mr. Obama would not be coming, without giving any reason.
Residents feel it is a mistake and he should be there next Tuesday.
“I personally think so, but obviously I can’t tell you what he thinks or what the people around him think,” said Bill Monahan, a former councillor and long-term resident.
“I would just leave it at we are all very disappointed.”
“I don’t think we should take it as a snub from the president,” added Ron Bailey, president of the fledgling Gettysburg Black History Museum. “It is a disappointment that we all share.”
But the African-American recognizes the symbolism and history and calls Mr. Obama’s absence an opportunity lost.
“To actually come here and punctuate the words of that Address that has been so profound and meaningful for the country,” he said. Local commentators are far less reticent. “Barack Obama is the most powerful man on Earth. If he wanted to be there on Nov. 19, he could make that happen,” says an editorial in the York Daily Record.
“The fact that he is uninterested or unwilling to do so is deeply disappointing — and likely to lead to further division in our politically cleft nation.”
Mr. Obama’s snub is puzzling, given he has been keen to wrap himself in Lincoln’s mantle, even to the extent of taking the oath of office twice on his predecessor’s Bible.
In 2008, the then-Illinois senator first announced he was running for the U.S. presidency at the same spot in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln had declared himself a candidate. Campaign staffers also encouraged comparisons of the two men, with Mr. Obama recreating Lincoln’s 1861 trip to Washington by train as part of his own inaugural journey.
Donald Gillibrand, a blogger for the Patriot News based in the state capital Harrisburg, doesn’t mince his words — in his view, the president is a coward and an opportunist.
“For a president who has so demonstrably associated himself with Lincoln — the heir of Lincoln’s policies who announced his candidacy from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield and used the Lincoln Bible (twice) at his inauguration — this is nothing less than a profile in cowardice,” he writes.