I really really wish that I had written this article as an Onion-style mockery of Lincoln idolatry. But, unfortunately, this is real, (follow the link to see the projected movie deal involving Spielberg and Liam Neeson!):

For 30 years, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the popular, television-friendly historian, has been married to Richard Goodwin, a former aide to presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

For the past decade, however, she has been living with another man.

Or, at least, that’s how she puts it. “I’ve been living with Abraham Lincoln.”

And to hear her description, it has been an emotional love affair.

Sexy is not an adjective often attached to Lincoln. It doesn’t appear in the 916 pages of Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, $35), a celebration of his personality and political pragmatism, due in bookstores Tuesday.

But in the book-lined living room of her 150-year-old renovated farmhouse in the suburbs of Boston, Goodwin uses just that word to describe the 16th president. Sexy.

The Best of Stephen W. Carson