I was going to write today about Barack Obama’s roots in Chicago—how that city, more than any place, made him.

But I got sidetracked reading the Chicago history of Abraham Lincoln, the only president “from” that city. He often rode up from Springfield to handle major cases, and he built his political base there from 1847 to 1860, when the new Republican Party, meeting in an oversized wooden wigwam, nominated him for president.

And that made me ask myself some questions. Is there any reason, other than the lean frame and knack for giving good speeches, to compare the two men? Is there any reason to see in Obama a Lincoln-like ability to unite a “house divided” in our perilous times? Is that even a fair question to ask or comparison to make?

I feel justified in asking because Obama himself raised these questions when he launched his candidacy February a year ago in front of the Old State House in Springfield. He didn’t lay the Lincoln references on thick, but he didn’t have to. Even I could hear the historical echoes. It was in that building, exactly a century and a half earlier, that Lincoln had committed himself to the cause of excising the cancer of slavery from our body politic.

And here was an African-American launching his candidacy for the same high office Lincoln had won—and, in so doing, aiming to prove, once and for all, that Lincoln was right about what is most central in our society: the idea that all men are created equal.

As Obama has said repeatedly, he is, by virtue of his own DNA, “the change we have been waiting for.” He is, by that standard, the rightful heir to Lincoln’s vision and hope. Obama is a brilliant and welcoming fellow with an eye for the main chance, a knack for offering himself as a vehicle for consensus.

But in what other way does Obama deserve to be seen as Lincolnesque?

In the life Lincoln led before his victory in 1860, he was tested as perhaps no leader in America had ever been—by financial struggle, personal loss, public humiliation and political defeat. He had risen above all of that—from the humblest beginnings imaginable—to become one of the leading lawyers in Chicago. He had studied the country from the ground up and the inside out, from its farm fields and rivers to its corporate boardrooms.

What testing, what true testing, has Obama ever faced besides eschewing a high-paying job out of Harvard Law School? To be blunt, his trials are a lot less Malcolm X than Obama’s autobiography has made it seem. The psychological strain of being a mixed race youth in Honolulu was no doubt trying, but he had the support of well-connected and loving grandparents who saw that he had the best education available in the state of Hawaii. 

To skeptics, Obama is nothing more or less than a suburban prep-school graduate who did well at Columbia and Harvard, and who smoothly propelled himself upward. He deployed his eloquence, brains and charm to build contacts among progressive foundations, elite universities and members of the extended Daley family of Chicago.

Obama’s community-organizing work was not very controversial (or effective); his affirmative-action syllabus at the University of Chicago Law School was earnestly PC but carefully mainstream; his famous speech against the war in Iraq in 2002 was prescient but not so heroic given the time and place: the early stages of a U.S. Senate race that would require initial liberal support.

Other than his one electoral loss, in 2000, when he impetuously ran for a U.S. House seat, what political adversity or long night of the soul has Obama faced? His contests for the Illinois legislature were essentially foregone conclusions; his U.S. Senate race in 2004 was a laugher and also a joke. After all, he ran against Republican Alan Keyes, famous for his squirrelly conservatism and minimal ties to the state of Illinois. It was an Obama cakewalk.

Nor does Obama’s decision to launch a presidential bid deserve a place in the “Braveheart” pantheon of pluck and daring. What did he really have to lose? Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite at the time; he was a tyro who could explain away an embarrassing loss as merely the wobbly flight test of a novice campaigner.

Obama had one truly tough moment in the primary season, when Clinton cleaned his clock in New Hampshire. But that was hardly a killer. South Carolina, with its huge black population, was next. Obama could and did appeal to racial solidarity, slyly accusing Bill Clinton of playing the race card even as he, Obama, did so.

From the moment the voting started in this campaign, Obama has never really been behind. Yes, he kept his cool in the first debate with John McCain, but when has he had to scramble, to reorder things, or overturn his strategic assumptions?

Never.

What have we learned about how Obama would handle a real crisis?

Nothing.

Do we know if he can claim descent from Chicago’s only president?

No.

So if he wins, and he well may, voters will have to hope that the lineage that traces back to Chicago is no mere coincidence, and that the echoes of Lincoln are credible enough to inspire us all.