We just disagree (And that's how it works.)

“It's one of the few regrets of my presidency,” Obama said, “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide….”

I doubt it.

Neither Lincoln nor FDR was able to bridge the gaps that their own policies created. Their triumphs, rather, were to prevail over their opponents. Simply by winning the 1860 election, months before he took the presidential oath, Lincoln prompted South Carolina and six other Southern states to secede. His first inaugural address concluded with a plea to the South not to commence a civil war. He appealed to the “better angels of our nature.” The South responded by bombarding Fort Sumter. So much for Lincoln’s ability to bring the nation together through his powers of persuasion. He was surely the greatest and most profound orator ever to serve as president, but while Frederick Douglass acclaimed his second inaugural address as “a sacred effort,” John Wilkes Booth heard the speech and resolved to kill Lincoln then and there.

From 1933 through 1937, Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress to enact the most far-reaching social legislation the nation had ever known. He did not accomplish this by convincing mainstream Republicans to back these measures. (There were liberal Republicans in those days who did support them, but they were the exception.) Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, Glass Steagall, and a host of other structural reforms were enacted, and the Works Progress Administration funded, because an electorate that had moved left in response to the Great Depression sent to Washington the most lopsidedly Democratic congresses in the nation’s history. Republicans reviled Roosevelt, calling him “that man” rather than even mentioning his name. His political appeal crossed the partisan aisle only when he donned the mantle of wartime president—and then, only sometimes.