This very interesting White House photo of edits made by the President before delivering his Inaugural Address (courtesy of James Fallows), gives the reader great insight into President Obama’s thinking, not to mention his editing abilities. As James Fallows points out, you can see how the president begins to work toward a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address. “That line isn’t in this draft shown in the picture — at least not the part we can see. But Obama is working toward it with this handwritten insert at the top of the page:
Through blood and toil ____ we learned that no nation founded on these principles could survive half-slave and half-free.
Fallow writes, “He recognizes that “toil” is not right — “blood and toil” would be an allusion to Churchill, not Lincoln — but he also knows that for cadence he needs another word after “blood,” where he’s crossed out “toil” and left a ___ mark.”
