Lincoln is the first film that I can say I saw before taking this class. I saw it in the State Theatre for my freshman year Rhetoric and Civic Life course, in which my professor emphasized the line about the compass not warning you of swamps, etc. I thought it was a poignant line that was very relevant in our age of extreme political partisanship. Now, a few years later, I still feel that it is relevant, especially with the presidential election coming up later this year.

Though there is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the (modern) Republican party, I’m going to focus on the Democrats since that’s what was mentioned during our class last Wednesday. I should preface this by saying that I haven’t been following the election very closely, and I am in favor of Bernie at the moment. We mentioned in class that Lincoln is the pragmatist, more comparable to Hillary. In that case, Bernie would be the idealist, like Stevens. The latter comparison is a fair one, I think. Bernie has lots of great ideas, but they can sound too good to be true. It would definitely be difficult to implement something like free college in the next four years, that’s for sure. However, I think comparing Spielberg’s Lincoln to Hillary is a bit more complicated. In the film, Lincoln believes in very lofty goals, but he is willing to compromise on the means to make the ends a reality. To outsiders, it may look like he doesn’t really believe in the equality of the races. Perhaps similarly, the current criticism that Hillary faces is that she doesn’t share some of the Democrats’ lofty goals and is now simply backtracking to win the primary. For instance, as far as I know Hillary has changed her opinion on such issues as LGBT marriage, the Keystone Pipeline, etc. Was she just compromising when she talked about those issues before? Did she really have a change of heart? Or, the worst option, is she just trying to win votes? It’s hard to say.

I would argue that, unfortunately, we can’t really know Hillary’s ideals without knowing her more personally. Perhaps if I read her book and paid more attention to the election, I’d feel differently but right now I just have mixed feelings. I can’t vote in the primaries anyway, so maybe my opinion isn’t as important, but I hope everyone who can will be voting in this coming election and gives some thought to this question of politicians’ true intentions.