Lincoln, Distinctive Even in Losing.

In 1962 Richard Nixon, having lost the presidency by a whisker two years before, lost the governorship of California – by more than a whisker. He reacted to that 1962 defeat at what he himself probably considered the final press conference of his now-defunct political career by telling the assembled journalists, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more.”

Nixon’s was one way to react to electoral defeat; Lincoln had another, and far more interesting, reaction. In 1858 he lost a hotly-contested race for the US Senate to Stephen Douglas, and when asked for his reaction said, “I felt like the boy who stubbed his toe rather badly. Hurt too much to laugh, and he was too big to cry.”

That quote sounds a note of wry detachment that points to self-pity but, unlike Nixon, doesn’t wallow in it. If I had lived in his day and that man had come up for election to some other office, I think I’d vote for a man like that!