Rarely does Barack Obama miss a chance to draw parallels between himself and Abraham Lincoln, and rarely do the media fail to indulge him. The cabinent selection process was particularly ripe for comparison to Lincoln, as pundits turned frequently to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s concept of a Team of Rivals.

In some ways, the comparisons are apt. Like Lincoln, Obama reached out to those who he defeated in forming his cabinet. When all was said and done, the only rivals he failed to bring in were either on the fringe (Gravel, Kucinich) or overtaken by scandal (Edwards, and, now, Richardson).

But in a deeper sense, the analogy is cliche. Lincoln united a party created out of the fight against slavery and took it and the nation to war. Obama faces a far simpler task. Though he seeks to bind and heal the wounds of liberalism’s 40 years at low tide, he was never faced with the threat of political irrelevance.

It has become fashionable in recent times to shy away from the ‘great man’ theory of history. Traditionally, historians looked to the giants to tell the stories of a nation — Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy. Today, we look to the individuals that make up the fabric of our country — women or workers, blacks or gays.

Goodwin firmly rejects the shift. Without Lincoln’s gift of “political genius,” as she calls it in the title, the Civil War might have been a losing effort and our nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal may not have endured.

I have long argued that the promise of Obama’s presidency is that he calls not to his own greatness, but to the greatness inherent in the American people. By rejecting our faith in him and asking that we instead have faith in our own ability, he challenges our will and demands our best. This is leadership.

Yet just the same, where would we be without him? What if the movement never made it past that snowy night in Iowa? What if Hillary Clinton would have run against Rudy Giuliani for the presidency? Where would we be if, instead of a leader with a 68 percent approval rating asking us (in essence) what we can do for our country, we had one of those two in office?

While the challenges our nation faces today are immeasurably smaller, the most apt comparison from Lincoln to Obama is not in leadership or convention management or cabinent assembly. It is in the extent to which each man is the man for his place and time.