Come to Cooper Union
On the evening of February 27, 1860, a near capacity crowd gathered inside the Great Hall at the Cooper Union in New York City. Nearly 1,500 New Yorkers curious about the man from Springfield, Ill., came to hear him speak. In a brilliantly vivid recounting of the 7,700-word address in his book "Lincoln at Cooper Union," Harold Holzer persuasively argues that it was this speech that made Abraham Lincoln president.
The speech focused on the one great issue of the day — whether the federal government had the power to limit the expansion of slavery in the new territories. Lincoln delivered it with a cogency and passion that won over the Eastern crowd.
Familiar with the text though he didn't go to New York with Lincoln, William Herndon, his law partner, said, "it was constructed with a view to accuracy of statement, simplicity of language, and unity of thought. In some respects like a lawyer's brief, it was logical, temperate in tone, powerful — irresistibly driving conviction home to men's reasons and their souls."
Two years prior, Lincoln had challenged the incumbent Illinois senator, Stephen Douglas, to debate slavery in their 1858 Senate contest. The seven Lincoln-Douglas debates captivated the nation and have been held up ever since as the gold standard in civilized political debate.
In 19th-century America, tradition forbade presidential candidates from speaking further once nominated. Those days are over. But is there a modern day application of the lessons from Lincoln's debates with Douglas and his address at the Cooper Union?
It is now February, 147 years to the day since Lincoln took the stage at Cooper Union. We face issues that Lincoln never could have imagined. We are in the fourth year of a foreign war. Seventy-six million baby-boomers will live longer than any previous generation in human history, necessitating the need for a workable Social Security solution.
Our current health care system is still mired in paper in an electronic age, 48 million are uninsured. Too many children are trapped in failing schools. And our economy is facing increasingly competitive challenges from China and India.
In 2008, America's next president will face challenges as daunting and as numerous as those faced by Lincoln.
We believe it is important that the 2008 campaign be different. While the re-creation of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates may be impractical in today's world, there is ample evidence to believe the American people would welcome a return to a more substantive issue-driven dialogue instead of the current banal horserace politics. By comparison to the presidential race of 1860, there are many more vehicles for Americans to not only observe the dialogue but also actually be part of it.
In 2004, the rules governing the general election presidential debates ran a full 32 pages. Lincoln's 1858 letter to Stephen Douglas challenging him to debate contained two sentences. Lincoln's only insistence was "perfect reciprocity, and no more."
Tomorrow evening at the Cooper Union we hope to provide at least one model — there are more — for the kind of discussion needed in 2008.
We're throwing out the current play book and having a 90-minute dialogue about America's future.
Our hope is that this kind of in-depth, unrestricted, but civil conversation will once again become the norm. To that end, we are inviting all the presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, to come to Cooper Union and to present their vision for America — just as Lincoln and several of his fellow White House aspirants did in 1860.
We believe that the simple act of bringing candidates and their supporters together in the same room will take at least half the poison out of our political system because the candidates would have to be less strident and more persuasive in their presentations. This will require more thought, more creativity, more substance, more solutions — and a whole lot less rhetoric.
America needs and deserves a better future. A better future requires candidates with better solutions to our challenges. And better solutions require a better format for dialogue and discussion. We're getting the ball rolling by offering one such model with this challenge to those running for president: Come to Cooper Union.
Mr. Cuomo, governor of New York between 1983 and 1994, and Mr. Gingrich, speaker of the House between 1995 and 1999, will appear together at Cooper Union on February 28. The event will be aired on C-SPAN and webcast at AmericanSolutions.com.
