Team of Rivals

I am reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom you may know from her occasional and always informative appearances on various TV news shows as a ranking Presidential Historian. I started reading it because I wanted to see in some detail what was going on in American politics during the decade or so prior to the start of the Civil War. What I did know about it indicated that there would be interesting parallels, and important differences, between then and right now. It turns out that this suspicion was well founded, and I am probably…