Some who know me well know that I am somewhat obsessed with Abraham Lincoln. In fact, my three sons have grown up under his gaze, as two photographs of him (supposedly among his favorites, done in 1860 while he was still campaigning for the presidency) hang in my living room. This probably has puzzled my mother and some of my more décor-minded friends, but I don’t care. I love his lined, rough-featured but confident face—not yet showing the weight of what was to come. I’m sure some will assume, mistakenly, that my love for him is based simplistically on the mythic characterizations of him that have reduced him to an impossibly heroic figure (who then predictably can easily be knocked down by those who know such heroes cannot possibly have existed.) So on what exactly is my love of Lincoln based?

First of all, of course, I didn’t know the man, so all of this is based on what I’ve read. But from what I’ve read, he was fully a human being, who struggled with crushes on women, who at times felt ashamed of his humble background and lack of formal education and could be intimidated by peers from more privileged beginnings, and who was ambitious and wily with his opponents. He was prone to melancholy and a believer in the importance of dreams and “signs.” He was naturally intelligent enough to compensate for his meager education, and had a well-known sense of humor and propensity for telling long-winded stories that often exasperated those with whom he worked. He had a rare absence of ego that enabled him to make decisions for the highest good of his country—decisions that at times subjected him to ridicule and scorn. He had an understanding of human nature that served him well in navigating the perils of the presidency, and a deep compassion that made his handling of his responsibilities as Commander-In-Chief all the more remarkable because he felt profoundly the enormity of sending the sons, brothers, and fathers of the country he served into battle, knowing the likelihood that they would not return. And he was wise.

Wisdom is probably the trait, of all that a President should have, I deem to be most essential because it presupposes other traits. I have a tiny snippet of newspaper pinned to my bulletin board at work, and on it are the words, “Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom”, attributed to American psychiatrist and writer Dr. Theodore Rubin. I can’t help but think of this when I watch the debates that dominate the news these days, because there seems to be such a lack of kindness—in fact, such a mean-ness in evidence. And of course, the participants and their supporters would claim that, after all, this is politics—and if that’s what it takes to get elected these days so as to then be able to do the noble work of leading, so be it—in other words, we should not assume that what people do has anything to do with who they are. It’s simply, they would have us think, the means to an end.

Being a Lincoln fan, I collect not only books but also magazine articles about him. I recently came across an old Life magazine from 1991 that featured Lincoln on the cover. Sticking out of the magazine was a post-it note with the words “this article is great!” in my handwriting. Opening up the magazine to the page it marked, I was surprised to see that the article was not about Lincoln at all, but rather was about another, more contemporary figure from politics—Lee Atwater. Remember him? I don’t, really, as I just didn’t follow politics then—but I do remember the article because it made such an impression on me. A self-admitted “ardent practitioner” of negative politics, Atwater was a career political consultant who, guided by books such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, was manager of George H. W. Bush’s winning presidential campaign in 1988 and Chair of the Republican National Committee. He was at the top of his game when he had a seizure that landed him in the hospital, where he was told that he had a brain tumor. After approaching that challenge as he had approached all of the other challenges in his life and finding out that the tactics that had served him so well were useless against this enemy, he gradually surrendered any illusions of having control and underwent, in his final months, the sobering but ultimately transformative experience of looking back over his life through the lens of sure, approaching death and a new-found spirituality. He began to realize that there were things more important than “the win.” And he finally, after a life guided by the concept of “this is all you’ve got, so grab it while you can”, embraced the gentleness of the Golden Rule.

Toward the end of the article, Atwater is quoted as saying “I’ve come a long way since I told George Bush that his ‘kinder, gentler’ theme was a nice thought, but it wouldn’t win us any votes. I used to say the President might be kinder and gentler, but I wasn’t going to be. How wrong I was. There is nothing more important in life than human beings, nothing sweeter than the human touch.”

Ultimately, of course, we’ll decide just who we want to lead us, and how we want our country to be represented around the world. Our president will be a reflection of us (supposedly most of us) and our values. And it always has been difficult for us to reconcile strength with kindness—as if the two cannot co-exist, thereby leaving us with the illusion of a choice between being kind but weak or mean but strong. I tend to believe that true kindness is strong because among other things it includes kindness to self and therefore boundaries that, at times, need to be enforced. It certainly took great strength to employ the kindness of the sort that motivated Lincoln to plan, when the Civil War was finally over, to embrace the South back into the Union and offer the help it would need to rebuild, rather than bow to what must have been considerable public pressure to punish it for its costly rebellion. But we and the world will see soon enough just who we Americans are.