Newly official presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes the Republican Party — and America — would do well to remember Abraham Lincoln. “Lincoln was perhaps the most transformational figure in our history,” Rubio wrote in a USA Today op-ed. “He had the courage to measure America as it was against America as it was intended to be, and to recognize the terrible distance between our founding ideas and the reality of slavery. He aspired to reform government to empower all our people equally, to break the powerful hold slaveholders had over Washington and to break the chains of slavery itself. By demanding America live up to its calling as a nation where our rights come from God, and where government exists to protect those rights without prejudice, Lincoln took it upon his generation to test, as he put it, ‘whether that nation, or any nation so conceived or so dedicated, can long endure.’ In the century and a half since, America has proven that it can, in fact, endure. Each generation after Lincoln’s has carried on the tradition of bringing America one step closer to its founding ideal of equal opportunity for all. The result has been the rapid spread of the American Dream — a Dream that in its short history has transformed millions of lives and altered the course of human events.” More…

For our own take on Lincoln, read Mark Alexander’s remembrance for what would have been his 200th birthday.